LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AS A RESPONSE TO THE DOMINANCE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH

The paper is devoted to multilingual practices in the vocal
competition “Golos”, which is the Russian version of the global
television show “The Voice” and is extremely popular in Russia.
The show is characterized by a particularly international status:
the participants represent different republics within the Russian
Federation, the CIS states, and various countries of the far
abroad. “Golos” demonstrates a wide range of local languages,
apart from English (the global lingua franca of popular music)
and Russian (the local lingua franca), which are native to some of
the contestants: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian,
Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hebrew, Czech,
Romani, Tatar, and so forth. In this study, such linguistic diversity
is described as the contestants’ creative response to the
dominance of Global English on the show and today’s popular
music in general.
In order to illustrate peculiarities of language contact in
contemporary musical discourse, 1338 monolingual and
multilingual songs performed by the contestants in Seasons 1 – 7
(2012 – 2018) were examined with the primary focus on language
choice in song lyrics. The critical analysis of the multilingual
performances was combined with elements of ethnography,
including exploration of the discussion between the contestant
and coaches after each performance, official interviews with the
participants and coaches on various Internet resources, and the
contents of “Golos” web-forums representing public responses to
the languages used on the show.
The study reveals the dominance of Global English in the first
two seasons of the show, which was supported by the coaches and
most vocalists who grew up on American popular music and are
used to the English language in music. In their opinion, Englishlanguage compositions provide more opportunities to
demonstrate vocal abilities than popular Russian songs. On the
contrary, the audience want to hear more Russian songs, as they
want to understand the meaning and the emotions behind each
song.
Since Season 3 (2014), the English has started to lose its
dominance in the show, and this was achieved by using the
following strategies: (1) signing English-language songs in
Russian translations; (2) singing entirely in languages other than
English (monolingual songs in Italian, French, Spanish,
Ukrainian, Portuguese, German, Yiddish); (3) combining lyrics in
several different languages (e.g. alternating the Yiddish, Russian
and English versions of the song “A Yiddishe Mame”); (4)
combining fragments with different melodies and in different
local languages (e.g. incorporating a fragment of a traditional
Chinese song into the English-language hit “Castle in the Snow”
or using a fragment of a song in Romani as an introduction to the
Russian romantic song “Ochi chernie”). These strategies proved
to be effective and created a special multilingual atmosphere of
the show. The range of languages in monolingual songs grew
larger to include Georgian, Moldovan, and Korean. The
languages used in fragments of multilingual songs also became
more diverse and included French, Italian, Spanish, Czech,
Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Romani, Hebrew,
Yiddish, Chinese, Arabic, West African Wolof, and even Latin. In
multilingual songs, the English language does not dominate but
becomes equal to local languages.
In “Golos”, local languages acquire symbolic and indexical
meanings, serving as markers of ethnic and cultural identities.
Mixing various languages in multilingual performances allows
the contestants to find a balance between demonstrating their
voice and satisfying audience’s expectations, create unexpected
and fresh combinations, and give a new life to songs from
different musical epochs and cultures. Finally, employing
languages other than English and Russian, the participants of the
show are able to demonstrate the linguistic diversity of the
Russian Federation as a multinational and multicultural state.
Keywords: language diversity; sociolinguistics; globalization;
multilingual performance; Global English