An account of social usages of Americanized argot in modern Russia1

This article reports the emergence of a new “Americanized” argot in post-Stalinist Russia. It attempts to qualify the type of communicative code characteristic of the argot and to illuminate the link between the code and the communicative competence of argot-speaking groups. The article examines the pattern of recruitment into argot-speaking groups. It speculates on the set of relationships between this pattern and the process of socialization in the wider social milieu at school and in the families of different socioeconomic classes. (Sociolinguistics, symbolic anthropology, social change, Slavonic and Soviet studies, social boundaries and “primary groups,” revitalization movements)