Rodnovery and the Russian Language: Linking Ancient Religion with the Evolution of East Slavic Languages
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2021-05
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Abstract
The origin, formation, and evolution of language has been an ongoing topic since the beginning of linguistics itself. This research aims to demonstrate and explain the relationship between the Slavic Native Faith, Rodnovery, and the development of the Russian language, as well as the impact of this relationship on the survival and ultimate comeback of the Native Faith in Russian society. To assess these two dimensions, a combination of both demographical data and lexical data have been used to perform multivariate regression analyses. The demographics data encompass the role of religion in modern Russian society, including non-Orthodox faiths like Rodnovery, and provide insight not only into presence of the faith but also its importance. The lexical data are comprised of 564,493 words taken from the modern Russian language, which were subsequently filtered to remove non-Slavic loan words and categorized by root word. The most important root word analyzed was rod, the name of the primary Rodnover god, and compared with the English language and its equivalent word, god. The results showed that overwhelmingly, the Russian language is far more heavily centered around religious terms than is English. Additionally, comparison between the two types of data allows for the secondary inference to be made—that it is plausible that Rodnovery survived a thousand years of repression due to its tenants being embedded within the Russian language itself.
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lemmatization, Rodnoverie, Rodnovery, Slavic