The “Four Concentric Circles of Russian”: Toward a Model

Braj Kachru suggested that one way of understanding the role and use of English around the world was to distinguish among three concentric “circles”: the inner circle, the outer circle, and the expanding circle. In this article, I will use Kachru’s model as the foundation for the development a similar model for positioning the Russian language in the contemporary world. The historical differences in Anglo-American linguistic expansion and Russian linguistic expansion lead to somewhat different divisions among speakers of the respective languages. The model proposed here has four concentric circles: an inner circle (consisting of the Russian Federation itself), an internal outer circle (countries that are former parts of the Russian Empire and USSR), an external outer circle (countries that historically were part of the Soviet bloc, etc., but not part of the USSR), and an expanding circle (both heritage and L2+ speakers in the remainder of the world). Included in the presentation of the proposed model are discussions of the status of Russian as a normatively monocentric language and the implications of the ideology of the Русский мир for this idea. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this model for encouraging and promoting the study and use of the Russian language, by both heritage and L2+ speakers.