Types and Conventionalization Patterns of Russian Ideophonic Expressions as a Sustainable Linguistic Culture

This study examines the linguistic characteristics and meaning-formation strategies of Russian ideophonic expressions and investigates their conventionalization patterns through repetition, commonality, and variation in native speakers’ choices for the same visual stimuli. In this study, “Russian ideophonic expressions” is used as an analytical term covering verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbal interjections, idiomatic expressions, metaphors, and other resources that depict visual movement, states, forms, and sensory imagery, without assuming a lexical category identical to Korean ideophones. Two complementary datasets were used. First, Korean ideophones and semantically corresponding Russian expressions were organized as contrastive data. Second, 23 native speakers of Russian recruited through online communities completed a free-response survey consisting of 17 visual situations. Frequencies and percentages were calculated using the valid number of responses for each item, and exact repetitions, same-root or morphological families, and broader expression strategies were analyzed separately. The results show that Russian speakers employ diverse linguistic resources rather than relying on a single ideophone-like lexical class. Five meaning-formation strategies were identified: direct description, metaphor, evaluative and psychological expression, multisensory expression, and culturally or cognitively motivated expression. The degree of convergence varied across stimuli. For example, the полз- family for very slow movement and the маятник family for a suspended swinging object each occurred in 10 of 23 responses (43.5%), while the буль-/бульк- family for boiling water occurred in 9 of 22 valid responses (40.9%). Other stimuli produced multiple competing expression families or highly diverse creative responses. In this study, conventionalization patterns do not mean that a particular expression has been socially standardized. Rather, they refer to the repetition, commonality, and variation of expression choices across speakers. The findings suggest that Russian ideophonic expression is a dynamic linguistic resource in which shared conventional expressions coexist with metaphorical and creative variation. Systematically documenting these resources provides a basis for Russian language education, translation, contrastive research, and the sustainable use of linguistic-cultural resources.