The influence of Russian in the Armenian language

Vliânie russkogo âzyka na (vostočno) armânskij

The article is an introductory presentation of the influence of the Russian language on (East) Armenian. Surprising though it may seem, hardly any research has been made on the subject so far. The authoress starts by discussing briefly the language contacts between Western Europe and Armenia, and between Armenia and Russia. This is followed by an analysis of circumstances which resulted in the increased influence of Russian on the languages of Trans-Caucasian countries. Next, to illustrate the language corpus to be fully studied in future, a number of representative examples of (East) Armenian loans from Russian are quoted for various thematic groups. The so-called internationalisms and calques from Russian are singled out from the point of view of both word formation and syntax.