Slang as a Form of Representing the Concepts of Russian Mentality in Contemporary Russian Language

The article examines contemporary Russian digital slang as a dynamic layer of the Russian language and as a means of actualizing culturally and axiologically significant meanings in contemporary communication. Moving away from an exclusively negative view of borrowed vocabulary, the study explores how borrowed lexical units are formally and conceptually adapted in Russian digital discourse. Drawing on V. V. Kolesov’s conceptual approach, A. Wierzbicka’s approach to the interpretation of emotion concepts, and E. A. Dshenkova’s linguocultural perspective, the research distinguishes between formal adaptation, including phonetic, orthographic, morphological, and derivational changes, and conceptual adaptation associated with the integration of borrowed units into existing semantic and evaluative patterns of Russian-language communication. The paper also theoretically distinguishes slang from jargon and treats slang as a mobile and variably expressive layer of informal speech with relatively diffuse social boundaries. Based on lexical units recorded in the LiveDune rankings for 2022 2025, the analysis demonstrates how words such as кринж, норм, рил, чушпан, and рофл actualize evaluative oppositions such as norm/deviation, authentic/inauthentic, self/other, acceptable/inappropriate, as well as meanings related to shame, irony, and distancing. The analysis combines semantic, comparative, lexicographical, and conceptological procedures and treats the selected dictionaries as an illustrative rather than exhaustive basis for comparison. Accordingly, the absence of a relevant entry in a particular source is not interpreted as evidence that the corresponding word or meaning is absent from English usage. A lexicographical comparison with the dictionaries of T. Dalzell, M. Probert, and R. Valencia shows that Russian usage does not always reproduce the slang meanings recorded in English sources and may instead preserve, narrow, expand, or functionally reinterpret them. The study therefore treats digital slang not as a homogeneous set of fashionable words, but as a heterogeneous sphere in which technical, conversational, expressive, and evaluative units may display different degrees of slang marking. Finally, the article emphasizes the relevance of digital slang for international Russian studies and for teaching Russian as a foreign language, where such units form part of learners’ cultural and communicative competence.