Siberia / Sibir / Sibir’ / Sybir: What’s in a Name?

All the coverage Siberia received in both mass and specialized literature not only failed to dispel the biases about the region, but, on the contrary, added to its mysterious and exotic image, which has grown further distorted due to mistranslations, misconceptions and misassumptions. The present research is aimed at outlining what Siberia came to mean in English – the language of international and intercultural communication widely used in secondary cultural orientation. Theoretically and methodologically the research is based on V. Kabakchi’s extensive research of language oriented towards an external culture, in this case – Russian-culture-oriented English. Dealing with a contact of linguocultures, the authors resort to the framework of contact linguistics, defining the resulting English as another variety in the family of World Englishes. Treating “Siberia” as a linguistic sign with its form and meaning poses before the researchers two sets of questions related to rendering “Siberia” in English: firstly, the choice of the correct terms and, secondly, indepth analysis of the concept(s) behind these terms. Thus, the paper covers the set of English-language equivalents to the Russian “Сибирь”, with the emphasis on distinctions between them in both meaning and stylistic function, passing then onto the problem of conceptualizing ‘Siberia’ through the means of the English language