All these ex-Communists, including the "Johnny-come-lately" anti-Communist crusaders like Borisov, have given up neither their old black-and-white way of thinking (or what Orwell calls "the totalitarian outlook" [55]) nor the militant phraseology of ideological intolerance and vehement vilification that comes with it. Much like the totalitarian-era propagandists who used to blame all the ills of the Communist system on the "surviving vestiges of capitalism and monarcho-fascism" in the nation's collective consciousness, the born-again "democrats" of today tend to blame the shortcomings of the new order on the totalitarian legacies of Communism, including the supposed national "failure" to condemn it. (56) And anyone who disagrees with them or engages in any other kind of ideological heresy is branded variously as a "Zhivkovite," "Communist holdover," "Red garbage," "Turkey's fifth column," "KGB agent," "Moscow's stooge," "Belgrade's dupe," "chauvinistic brown-shirt," "fascist," and many other similarly disparaging epithets of totalitarian-style name-calling.
Blaga Dimitrova also complained about the disappearance of politeness and civility under Communism, when "the polite verb forms like 'please,' 'I'm sorry,' and 'excuse me' are almost forgotten nowadays." (57) But she would not have found the situation much different today. In fact, the Bulgarian press has complained about the veritable "tsunami" of aggressive "rudeness" that is sweeping post-Communist public discourse and everyday speech (to which Prime Minister Borisov and especially his controversial ex-Finance Minister Simeon Diankov have contributed immensely with their often vulgar and incendiary language). (58) Journalists warn that polite words and phrases (like the Bulgarian equivalents of "excuse me," "beg your pardon," "sorry," "my apology," "please," or "thank you") have disappeared from the contemporary vocabulary to such an extent than they all might as well be removed from Bulgarian dictionaries as only very rarely used, obsolete or even archaic.
But, as Dimitrova also suggests (59), mass consciousness, though generally conformist even to the point of being slavish, could be at the same time fickle and politically unreliable. For when a wide gap exists between official rhetoric and everyday realities, the skepticism and cynicism of ordinary people can give rise to a sarcastic counter-language (most often in the form of political jokes, puns, humorous proverbs, wordplay, comic poems and ditties, caricatures, graffiti, and other satirical messages of dissent and defiance) that mocks the distorted official view of reality and reveals the true state of affairs. Much like in the totalitarian era, Bulgarians have again taken to composing, most often anonymously, countless anti-government jokes, poems, and puns, ridiculing the "democratic" and "Euro-Atlantic" pretensions of the new ruling nomenklatura class in what many local writers--sometimes even among the generally Big Brother-friendly and sycophantic mass media--call "Bulgaristan" (a derisive allusion likening post-Communist Bulgaria to the politically undemocratic and economically backward states of post-Soviet Central Asia). A good example of such satirical counter-propaganda language is a popular recent joke, in which Ivancho ("little Ivan," a fictional character of numerous jokes during the totalitarian period) asks his father, "What is democracy?" His father patiently explains, "Ivancho, democracy is just like our family. I work every day and earn all the money, so I am capitalism. Your mother does not work, yet she makes all important decisions, so she is the government. Our maid works day and night to take care of our needs, thus she is the working class. You don't work because you must attend school every day, so you are the intelligentsia." "But, Dad, how about my baby brother?" asks Ivancho. "Well, your baby brother is the future of our democracy." In the middle of the night the baby's crying awakens Ivancho who runs barefoot into his parents' bedroom only to find that his brother badly needs a change of diapers. But Ivancho cannot wake up his mother who is sound asleep, nor can he find his Dad. He then runs into the maid's room only to find her having sex with his father. In the end, Ivancho gives up and goes back to bed. In the morning he tells his father, "Dad, now I know what democracy is really like. Capitalism is screwing the working class, but the government is doing absolutely nothing to stop it. The intelligentsia is powerless to do anything on its own, and our democracy's future is all covered in sh*t!" (60)
Xenologophilia
Even though it is not in and of itself a strictly totalitarian tendency, another linguistic similarity between the Bulgarian Communists and their post-Communist successors is what John Wesley Young calls the "xenologofilia" (Latin for "affection for foreign words") of totalitarian language. (61) Such linguistic proclivity tends to produce what Orwell calls a "bastard vocabulary" made up of numerous foreign words and phrases usually "translated with a maximum of clumsiness." (62) During the Communist years there was a massive infusion of Russian loanwords into Bulgarian. Many of the regime's cadres received their training and indoctrination in Soviet educational institutions and brought back with them a large stock of Russian terms, idioms, and ideological cliches which they used extensively in their professional activities as well as in daily life. Throughout these years, all Bulgarian students without exception had to study the Russian language as a compulsory subject, starting from primary school and continuing through at least the first year of higher education. Also, every Friday evening the national television (for many years Communist Bulgaria had only one TV channel) broadcast nothing else but news, shows, and sport events in Russian--in fact, re-broadcasting for its viewers the programs of Moscow's main TV channel Ostankino. (63)
Inevitably, all this led to some significant changes in the lexicon of the everyday language of Bulgarians, who began using many Russian words even in the vernacular (a process of linguistic "code-switching" and "code-mixing" facilitated by the similarity between these two Slavic languages). Much of the country's official terminology and ideological vocabulary came to consist of Russian loanwords. Many Russian terms began to eclipse their more traditional Bulgarian equivalents. (64) For example, the Russian loanword shkola ("school") began to elbow out the equivalent Bulgarian term uchilishte. The Russian term razvedka ("reconnaissance") began to be used as often as the native word razuznavane. Uborka ("cleaning") replaced the traditional Bulgarian noun pochistvane. Similarly, the Russian-derived term vertolet ("chopper") nearly eclipsed the Greek-derived lexeme helikopter. Even the Russian greeting privet ("hello" or "hi") began to be frequently used in place of the traditional Bulgarian greetings zdravei or zdrasti. Critical observers like Blaga Dimitrova attributed this widespread pattern of incorporating Russian terms into the written and colloquial usage of Bulgarian to the Communist government's political vassalage to the Soviet Union.
There has been a similar massive influx of English lexical items and expressions into Bulgarian during the post-Communist period due to the West's overwhelming political, economic, and cultural influences in Bulgaria as well as the efforts of the new authorities to promote the "de-communization," "democratization," and "Europeanization" of their country. After the fall of Communism, English became the most studied and widely used foreign language (for example, a recent law passed by the GERB-dominated parliament has even made it mandatory for all university-level academics in Bulgaria to prove their proficiency in English), while the study of Russian, German, and even French has declined. Many Bulgarians (including the new regime's top cadres and even many ex-Communists) now travel to the U.S. and Western Europe (mainly Britain) for their education and professional training which is usually conducted in English. As a result, a lot of changes have taken place in the lexical-semantic corpora of the official and vernacular Bulgarian language (according to Liubomir Levchev, Bulgaria's most famous living poet, at least 5,000 English words have entered the Bulgarian language in the last 20 years alone). Many English loanwords have entered the native vocabulary through the mass media--very often simply by adding a Bulgarian grammatical suffix to the English word. For instance, a new verb kanseliram has been coined just by adding the Bulgarian grammatical suffix -iram to the English verb "cancel," even though a perfectly good native equivalent exists (otmeniam). The neologism frustriram has been likewise formed by adding -iram to the English verb "frustrate," as was another oft-used neologism, otoriziram, similarly coined from the English verb "authorize."
Lexical borrowings and constructions from English have consequently displaced a large number of earlier Russian borrowings (or what Dimitrova calls "Russicisms" [65]) and even many traditional Bulgarian words and phrases. For example, the Russian borrowing reviziya (which itself may have come originally from French) has now been largely replaced by the rather odd-sounding neologism odit, which is the Bulgarian transliteration of the English noun "audit". Quite similarly, the traditional Bulgarian term izpit ("exam") is being edged out by the English loanword "test." Mladezh ("youngster") and iunosha ("youth") are being both eclipsed by tineidzhur , the Bulgarian transliteration of the English lexeme "teenager." The clumsy neologism koherenten, the Bulgarian transliteration of the English word "coherent," is upstaging the native adjective smislen. The newly-created word fen ("fan" or "supporter") has nearly replaced the native noun zapalianko. Relevanten is coming close to replacing suotveten ("relevant"). Even the ear-irritating inaguratzyia, the Bulgarian transliteration of the English lexeme "inauguration," is now part and parcel of the new "bastard vocabulary." (66) Even Prime Minister Borisov would rather use imidzh, the Bulgarian transliteration of the English noun "image," instead of the traditional native lexeme obraz. (67) "Impyichmunt" (the title of an article in the daily Standart, dated November 10, 2009, concerning the first of the attempted impeachments of Socialist President Georgi Purvanov by the GERB-led majority in parliament) is the Bulgarian transliteration of the English lexeme "impeachment," which has now entered the language to such an extent that today no one even remembers what Bulgarian equivalent was used in the totalitarian past (when discussing the impeachment of U.S. President Nixon, for example). Some perplexed readers, who probably do not speak much English and thus have absolutely no idea what such oft-used neologisms as nonsens (the Bulgarian transliteration of "nonsense") or puzel (the Bulgarian transliteration of "puzzle") could possibly mean, have complained that they are having a hard time comprehending the heavily anglicized Bulgarian (or "Anglo-Bulgarian," as some critics have quipped about the constant use of so many foreign terms and verbs [68]) found in the news reports and articles of the current Bulgarian press.
Even the way politicians and journalists express themselves in Bulgarian has changed under the growing influence of English. For example, the "Russicism" varel ("barrel," as in "a barrel of crude oil") has been transformed phonetically into the more English-sounding word barrel. Even a pivotal political term like reformi ("reforms"), overused during the transition period and traditionally pronounced as [re-'for-mi], began to be pronounced instead (especially by anti-Communist politicians) as [ri-'for-mi]--that is, sounding more like the pronunciation of the equivalent English word. When speaking of the "difficulties" the country is experiencing, politicians and journalists alike invariably use the politically fashionable though hardly appropriate word predizvikatelstvo (which is the Bulgarian translation of the English lexeme "challenge") rather than the semantically much more accurate traditional noun zatrudnenie ("difficulty"). Such changes in phonetics, grammar, and syntax, which are affecting even colloquial linguistic expressions, are now so widespread that they are actually setting the standard for everyday language usage (the lingua franca).
The Ivan Kostov government formed in 1997 by the fanatically anti-Communist Union of Democratic Forces (SDS) even pushed unsuccessfully for replacing the Cyrillic alphabet with the "more universal" and "transparent" Latin alphabet--an idea fervently supported by then President Petar Stoyanov (1996-2001), also of the SDS. But Kostov's infamous "choice of civilization" proposal, which seemed ominously reminiscent of the politically-motivated orthographic reform carried out by the Communists in 1945 (69), was rejected by the other political parties, especially since Bulgarians are very proud of having pioneered the Cyrillic alphabet by being the first to adopt it, then introducing it to other Slavic nations.
Conclusion
The fall of Communism in Bulgaria has made it all the more urgent to create an intellectually and morally honest, open, and referential language that would be more suitable for the public discourse of a newly-democratized and free nation. But Dimitrova warned us early on of "the danger of slipping into verbiage analogous to the socialists, that is, to do nothing but launch loud declarations 'in the spirit of democracy'." (70) Struggling to convince a distrustful and skeptical public of the advantages of Western-style democracy and "free-market" capitalism compared to the failures of totalitarian Communism and the state-run economy, politicians today still resort to the use of a high-flown, boastful, and manipulative phraseology largely reminiscent of the old deceptive Communist lingo with its inflated bombastic style of "magic spells," "fanfare phrases," and "verbal euphoria" (in Dimitrova's own words). In fact, one of the former SDS leaders complained recently that "I am appalled by the spread of totalitarian language and thinking throughout the entire Bulgarian nation." (71)
The continued presence of ex-Communists in many high-level positions in politics, business and the media, as well as the oligarchic, corporatist, and conspiratorial nature of post-Communist politics may have made such vestiges of totalitarian language, including the reliance on standard propaganda stereotypes in defiance of all linguistic logic, even harder to uproot. For, like their colleagues from the totalitarian past, politicians today have discovered that their most dangerous enemy is that sleeping, acquiescent and inattentive beast, namely the mass public--the repository of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's volonte generale--which more often than not needs to be misled, manipulated, and kept from thinking rather than being informed, followed or accommodated (according to the vox populi vox Dei view of the role of public opinion in politics).
The new openness of the post-Communist language of politics thus cannot obscure the many similarities of speech, spoken and written, with the totalitarian period. In fact, the evidence presented in this sociolinguistic analysis can only confirm the timeless validity of Orwell's contemptuous remark about the corrupt linguistic practices of politicians and political parties everywhere, namely that "Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." (72) Considering the numerous economic, financial, social, political, demographic, moral and other deep-seated problems within the country, how to further democratize post-Communist public discourse and eradicate the totalitarian legacies in the lexica and semantics habitually used by Bulgarian politicians is not going to be an easy task and will probably take a whole lot of time to accomplish.
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