Are Russian loanwords more permanent than the Sino-Russian treaties? : A study of the integration and use of Russian lexical borrowings in Modern Standard Chinese with a historical perspective on language contact

Abstract: China and Russia began their shared history in the 17th century and have since had stable and unstable language contact which has had an effect on the Russian-Chinese linguistic exchange. This study explores the integration and use of Russian loanwords in Modern Standard Chinese by using two quantitative methods. The first method being a manual search in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典 of 237 selected loanwords that have been sourced from four different Chinese academic publications. The results show that 18 out of 237 loanwords have been included in dictionary and 9 of the 18 included words are part of the political semantic domain. The second qualitative method was based on the BCC Chinese Corpus, a balanced linguistic corpus that holds 9.5 billion words. The word frequency tool of the corpus was used to determine the level of usage of the loanwords in contemporary Standard Chinese. The results from the corpus correlated with the findings in the dictionary. 55 out of 237 loanword presented results in BCC Chinese Corpus, the 18 words from the dictionary were also the highest frequency words in the corpus. The combined results were further analyzed by using historical background information and a borrowing scale to identify the factors that may have contributed to the quantitative outcome. The leading factor to the low performance of the loanwords can be attributed to the instability of Sino-Russian relations which has affected the overall attitudes toward Russia and its language. The turbulent ethnic minority politics in China are also likely to have decreased the likelihood of Russian loanword usage. Loanwords associated with politics showing high results in the corpus can be explained by the decade long intense language contact due to Sino-Soviet alliance in 1950s, but also the persisting relevance of communist terms in China.