Nataliya Loshakova

The article deals with the actual issue of the active introduction of Anglicisms into the system of the modern Russian language. This process is now gaining incredible proportions, which provokes serious fears among Russian linguists. According to some of them, such a pace of any language change due to the influence of a foreign language may threaten its distinctive development and, ultimately, cause significant damage to the national culture as a whole. The author describes the meaning of foreign borrowing in general and Anglicisms in particular as a factor in the development of the Russian language lexical system. The paper discusses modern approaches to the definition of “Anglicism”, the classification of English borrowings and some ways of adapting foreign words, analyzes the causes and consequences of the active introduction of Anglicisms into the Russian language at the present stage, makes an evaluation of the influence of borrowing British lexemes on the development of Russian.