The article explores the interplay between imperialism and ethnonationalism, revealing how these seemingly conflicting ideologies coalesced in Russian political thought. The period of 1989–1994 saw a struggle between civic nationalism, which sought to redefine Russia within its existing borders, and imperialist-nationalist currents that viewed Soviet disintegration as a geopolitical catastrophe. Within this ideological conflict, the “time bomb” metaphor emerged as a potent rhetorical device, encapsulating anxieties about territorial fragmentation and national decline. The study identifies Russian émigré intellectual Gleb Rahr as a key figure in introducing the metaphor, later popularized by figures such as Dmitry Rogozin and Vladimir Putin.

This article offers a new reconstruction of the phonological history of pre-Old English, building on a potential parallelism between English, Frisian and North Germanic. Pivotal to the reconstruction is the development of PGmc *a, which is the target of eight different sound laws in the traditional theory. A combination of a conditional early fronting and rounding, followed by a gradual i-mutation impact, both with parallels in Frisian, and a relatively late seventh-century application of breaking before ‑rC can account for most of the attested spellings of instances with PGmc *a in the language of the early Épinal and Erfurt glossaries. This approach is much simpler than the traditional theory and allows parallelisms to be (re)established between the earliest stages of Old English, Old Frisian and Old Norse.

If supposedly homophonous words were acoustically distinct despite sharing phonemic form, theories of mental storage may have to account for the consistent differences with separate storage for each homophone. Previous studies of the homophonous functions or word classes of the English word like showed such subphonemic differences between functions, though some studies also found effects of utterance context alongside these. Schleef & Turton (2018) argued that all these function effects reduce to context effects, since function is not independent of context – for example, quotative like typically occurs before a pause and thus is typically subject to lengthening because of its position, not due to a lexicalised acoustic distinction between functions. Testing this argument with new data from a different regional variety to those used by Schleef & Turton, we only find differences that can be explained by context, in line with their argument. This casts prior findings of acoustic distinctions between like functions in new light, and introduces the need for further research (especially including the frequency of different functions).

This article analyzes four war-themed exhibitions in Ukraine’s two leading national museums and studies their role in documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting the Russo-Ukrainian war. This research intends to prove that since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, museums have been conceptualizing the war through narratives of suffering and sacrifice, grounding tangible historical authenticity through the display of items such as war trophies and personal belongings. The narrative of suffering tends to be based on the opposition of “we” and “they,” where “we” focuses on civilian torment and resurrection as the main metaphor of physical and spiritual survival, and “they” are predominantly depicted as the military enemy, creating strong anti-Russian and anti-Soviet tendencies. The martyrdom narrative of sacrifice focuses on Ukraine’s (fallen) defenders, whose image is created by deep personalization, nationalization, and heroization. This article argues that musealization of the Russo-Ukrainian war exemplifies and represents “warring memory,” which is predetermined and justified by active engagement in an ongoing war while performing the functions of testimony, resilience, and mourning.

This article explores the extent to which listeners vary in their ability to notice, identify and discriminate variable linguistic features. With a view to improving speaker evaluation studies (SES), three types of experiments were conducted (noticing tasks, identification tasks and discrimination tasks) with regard to variable features using word- or sentence-based stimuli and focusing on three variables and their variants – (ING): [ɪŋ], [ɪn]; (T)-deletion: [t], deleted-[t]; (K)-lenition: [k], [x]. Our results suggest that the accurate noticing, identifying and discriminating of variants is somewhat higher in words than in sentences. Correctness rates differ drastically between variants of a variable. For (ING), the non-standard variant [ɪn] is more frequently identified and noticed correctly. Yet, for the variables (T)-deletion and (K)-lenition, the standard variants are identified and noticed more successfully. Results of the current study suggest that a more rigorous elicitation of identification and noticing abilities might be useful for a more complete understanding of the nature of social evaluation.

In the late nineteenth century, the orally transmitted Armenian legend about the folk hero David of Sassoun seemed doomed to oblivion when Ottoman Armenian clergyman Karekin Srvandzdiants published a tiny booklet containing the story that he had learned by chance. Srvandzdiants noted that he would be happy if the story could reach twenty people. Decades later, this hitherto little-known folk legend would be read, and its main heroes celebrated by tens of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union. Scores of variants of the epic were collected from all over the newly established Soviet Armenia; some of the most revered Soviet poets and linguists produced a collated text of the epic and translated it into dozens of languages. More importantly, David of Sassoun and other heroes of the epic cycle came to symbolize the newly forged Soviet Armenian national character in a vast totalitarian empire whose guiding ideology was inimical to various aspects of Armenian traditions. In this article, I examine the underlying messages of the epic, discuss how Soviet policies helped the epic captivate a large audience in a short period, and analyze the political calculations and ideological justifications behind the promotion of the epic.

The article addresses the question of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary immobility under emigration restrictions. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with people whose family members intended to emigrate from the Polish People’s Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic but who have not fulfilled their intentions, it examines the role of the would-be migrant’s agency in driving the immobility outcome under the narrow opportunity structure for international mobility. The analysis of reasons for the emigration intentions of formerly aspiring migrants having remained unfulfilled demonstrates that the boundary between voluntary and involuntary immobility – similar to that of voluntary versus forced migration – is often blurred. The studied cases suggest it is more justified to view immobility through the lens of a continuum of (in)voluntariness rather than as a voluntary-involuntary binary. Moreover, the study shows how the blurriness of the boundary between voluntary and involuntary immobility may be understood through changes over time in the reasons for the non-realization of one’s migration intentions.