How the Russian language is changing: a discussion with Arto Mustajoki

This week, the final event of the project “How has the Russian language changed in the 2020s?” took place, featuring one of Finland’s most renowned scholars of the Russian language — Professor Arto Mustajoki.

Arto Mustajoki spoke about how contemporary political, social, and cultural processes influence the Russian language. An unexpected example he mentioned was the word “скуф” from Russian internet culture, which amused the audience. The professor explained that the term means roughly a middle-aged “couch potato”.

During the discussion, Professor Mustajoki also addressed the phenomenon of “newspeak” (novoyaz) in Russia’s modern political context, explained the lexical changes caused by the war and censorship, and described the difference between the prepositions “в” and “на” in the expression “in/on Ukraine”.

The conversation with Arto is available as a recording in Finnish: https://youtube.com/live/-8kmAlVYWDY