?
Экспрессивные этнонимы в русском языке: систематизация и оценка
The article aims to systematize and evaluate thirty Russian ethnonyms,
mostly of expressive and/or negative nature (ethnic slurs), according to several criteria, the most universal of which is the assessment of the degree of offensiveness
(rudeness). Another task was to establish a correlation between the age and gender
of the Russian respondents vs. their knowledge of the word and its evaluation. Additional criteria also included stylistic labels like ‘ironic’, ‘inappropriately intimate’,
‘bookish’, or ‘outdated’. Apart from describing and systematizing specific ethnonyms,
the study was also to verify the respective procedures proposed and qualify the results obtained as reliable/ interpretable. For this purpose, a survey of 200 respondents was undertaken to obtain qualitative and quantitative data on a range of ethnonyms. The main idea was to evaluate the selected ethnonyms along the ‘rudeness’
scale by obtaining native speakers’ opinion on the proposed lexemes. Our interpretation of the survey results made it possible to clarify the meanings of a number of ethnic group labels (khachi, churki ‘entrants from the Caucasus and/or Central Asia
regions’, chernyye ‘blacks’, etc.) and establish that some fluctuations along the rudeness score depend on the specific meaning intended in each individual case. In some
cases, the study established a correlation between the assessment along a rudeness
scale and the age of the respondent (as, for example, for the word negry ‘negro,
black ethnicity’). An age-related correlation between respondent’s knowing a word
and understanding its actual meaning was found as, for example, for the word chuk-
hontsy ‘Finns’. Expressive (inappropriately intimate, etc.) ethnonyms with a low
rating of offensiveness were also found, as for example, dagi — referring to people from Dagestan. Also found was a significant deviation from the minimum rudeness score for regular ethnonyms normally considered neutral as, for example, for the word tadzhiki ‘Tajiks’ that can be described as demonstrating a “negative shift”