Russophones of the Near Abroad: Diagnosis of Changes in the Thesaurus of Linguistic Personality

The paper deals with the problem of the Russian language functioning in the post-Soviet area as a mother tongue for russophones - bilingual and polylingual ones, in particular. It reviews the characteristics of their linguistic personality diagnosing preservation of its dominant original identification characteristics under the influence of foreign linguocultural environment and the Russian component decreasing. The author considers such linguistic markers as the increasing number of agnonyms, xenonyms and national-cultural gaps to be the symptoms of marginalization of the Russian linguistic personality that should be considered as a signal to develop appropriate linguodidactic solutions as applied to the formation of the Russian linguistic personality in the near abroad.

linguistic personality, near abroad, agnonyms, xenonyms, gaps, marginality