“Look at all those nouns in a row"—authoritarianism, democracy, and the iconicity of political Russian

Abstract

A linguistic evolution that is encountered repeatedly in transitions from authoritarianism to democracy is recurring in contemporary Russia. A very frequent, and perhaps universal, feature of authoritarianism is the confinement of political deliberation to a language markedly separate from the vernaculars spoken by populations under authoritarian rule. Transitions toward democracy, whether ultimately successful or failing, commonly begin when someone—perhaps one of the authoritarian rulers, perhaps one of the people living under domination—transgresses the rules separating speech about politics from everyday speech. In polities that complete the transition to election of national leaders by a universal franchise, the speech of electoral politicians merges into everyday speech. The rapprochement with the vernacular, which is measurable by change in the iconicity of political speech, reduces the conceptual distance separating rulers from the people. Reduction of conceptual distance invites Russian citizens to believe in the efficacy of democratic participation.

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