Naming People with Disabilities in Contemporary Russian

Abstract

The study aims to analyse naming people with disabilities in contemporary Russian, depending on context and pragmatics, as well as highlight current ideologies and speakers’ attitudes. The data comprises media and social networks publications, interviews with people with disabilities and their relatives, examples from spontaneous oral speech, and a web corpus. The article analyses linguistic models of forming nominations and changes in discourse, investigates various understandings and uses of the word ‘disabled’ (which remains the most frequent, being inevitable in many contexts), opinions and attitudes of different groups, as well as current ideologies that they take into account, including competing ones (people-first vs identity-first). Principles for choosing labels differ in various discourses. Within smaller social groups, where names play a role of group identity markers, jargon items are often preferred. Public discourse favours the ideology of political correctness and the people-first principle, with the corresponding model and compound nominations consisting of several words. The activist discourse is also characterized by orienting towards the social model of disability and new ideologies (neurodiversity, fighting against ableism, frequently the identity-first principle) and stating clear-cut restrictions. Attitudes of people with different disabilities towards naming vary: some are rather opinionated, while others are indifferent. Modern euphemistic nominations can be perceived negatively because they make disability invisible. In some cases, a label acts as an identity marker or expresses a certain ideology, while in others it is chosen less consciously, but nevertheless can be interpreted using existing ideologies by recipients.