Some Peculiarities of Russian Language in Kyrgyzstan

The paper deals with the peculiarities of the Russian language variety spoken in Kyrgyzstan. We rely on the method of participant observation, also using some additional data from published sources and search engine results. We analyze the local variety of Russian as a system regulated by a set of factors. First, we discuss the sociolinguistic factor, namely the percentage of Russian population in various regions of Kyrgyzstan, and illustrate its influence on the local variant of Russian. Second, we cluster the non-standard features of the local variant of Russian into several groups. Thus, we show that some morphosyntactic constructions (comparative constructions, some types of noun phrases, some valency patterns), as well as polysemy patterns of some lexemes are instances of pattern borrowing from Kyrgyz. Several phenomena are, however, related to the absence of some oppositions in Kyrgyz (cf. gender mismatches or deviations in the choice of an aspectual form). Third, in the local variant of Russian there are lexical regionalisms that are absent in standard Russian, but cannot be explained by the influence of Kyrgyz.