Ural Federal University: Multilingual Learning Technologies Are the Theme of International Mother Tongue Day

International Mother Tongue Day was celebrated around the world on February 21. The theme of the UNESCO holiday in 2022 are the problems and opportunities of multilingual learning technologies. For this date the linguists of Ural Federal University noted the impact of the ongoing changes, including the development of digital technologies, on the Russian language.

Thus, within the UrFU project “Ural Humanitarian Initiative” a book of popular science essays “Topical words on the timeline” was published. Professors of the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Verbal Communication Irina Vepreva and Natalia Kupina collected the most topical words from 2005 to 2020. Among them: monetization, glamour, import substitution, bitcoin and, finally, the word of 2020 – Covid.

“The topical Russian word touches a nerve, it leads to a debate about language, speech communication and current issues of our time. The fate of words is different: some lose relevance, while others, such as the word for doping in 2017 or bitcoin in 2018, are anchored in the official news texts. The book of essays presents a cross-section of the linguistic picture of modern life,” said Anna Plotnikova, Director of the Faculty of Philology at Ural Federal University.