Russian English and what it is not

The arguments against the Expanding Circle (EC) Englishes being varieties in their own right are often provoked by terminological inaccuracies both in professional and folk-linguistic debate. The aim of the article is to particularize the concept of Russian English by highlighting the differences between Russian English as an EC variety per se and a number of English-related forms and practices in Russian-based intranational communication, which also might be referred to as Russian English or Rus(s)lish/Runglish. The article discusses the notion of Ruslish in detail, drawing on the recent surveys of “hybrid Englishes,” or “X-lishes” in World Englishes theory. The study provides a qualitative analysis of a corpus of examples illustrating different conceptualizations of Ruslish and some of its major tokens. As a result, Ruslish in the narrow sense of the term, as the basilectal sub-variety of Russian English, is distinguished from Ruslish as a broader language-contact concept embracing various cases of English-Russian interaction, primarily the Englishization of Russian, which is closer to its folk metalinguistic interpretation. A special emphasis is placed on the cases of “mock Russian English/Ruslish,” a form of bilingual language play, a linguistic parody, when distinctive features of Russian English or Ruslish are exaggerated and ironically quoted in “styling the Other.” The article also follows the translanguaging approach to hybrid Englishes investigation and some emergent practices of translanguaging in written English-Russian interaction, specifically some cases of Roman-Cyrillic “trans-scripting,” or “tranßcripting”, are tentatively defined as “new Ruslish.”