Methods of monitoring anglicisms in discourse of the Russian youth

The lack of long-term comprehensive monitoring of English borrowings in youth discourse and sociolect makes this study relevant. Our aim is to describe the authors’ methods for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of anglicisms in the sociolect of the Russian youth. We also aim to clarify the lexicographic consolidation modes of anglicisms in the Russian literary language. The hypothesis is that anglicisms dominate other linguistic units in the youth sociolect, such as newspeak and individual word creation. However, they do not entrench in the Russian literary language. This survey is a pilot macroproject, which encompasses two microprojects. The first microproject was conducted at Volgograd State University (2017-2019) and Saratov State University (2020-2022). The experiments involved 135 respondents aged 16 to 25. The second microproject was carried out at Kazan State University in 2022-2024. There were 210 respondents aged 15 to 25. The research material included 345 online and offline questionnaires and data from lexicographic sources and corpora. A unified methodology included classification and comparative methods, sociolinguistic interviewing, and psycholinguistic introspection. We have found out the main sources of English borrowings in the youth discourse and anglicisms frequency among slangisms. The influence of social characteristics on language variants distribution has been detected. The current findings demonstrate discrepancies between the indicators of anglicisms in the questionnaires and in the Russian National Corpus. The authors’ monitoring methods can be further applied for sovereignty preservation of the Russian language system.