INFLUENCE OF THE SERBIAN LANGUAGE ON THE RUTHENIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

In the past the Ruthenian language was influenced by Hungarian and German, and today – by Serbian and English. All members of Ruthenian national community are bilingual. They are excellent speakers of both Ruthenian and Serbian.

Маny serbisms have been borrowed because corresponding words and expressions do not exist in Ruthenian, but some of them have been borrowed even though corresponding words / phrases / expressions do exist. Written compositions of the students of the Department of Ruthenian Studies composed in the 2013/2014 academic year present the corpus of the research. In this paper the author points at mistakes the students make most frequently on all levels of linguistic analysis (for ex. on lexical – borrowings and calques; on morphological – gender changes and Nominative plural forms; on syntactic level – constructions with conjunction да and reflexive verbs). He also classifies them for teaching purposes.

Some of the linguistic occurrences (for ex. calques in youth speech, formation of the past participle, syntactic and semantic changes in connection with reflexive verbs) have not been discussed in Ruthenian studies so far.