ABSTRACT
The chapter offers an overview of current Russian sociolinguistic research. The authors center primarily on the studies of the 2010s and early 2020s, which focus on the links between the linguistic, communicative features of adult native speakers of Russian and their social characteristics. After a brief historical background, the chapter tells the reader about some approaches to describing language variation, types of variation, research works in the field of regional variation and regiolects, studies on age and generational differences between speakers, and variance by socio-economic class and gender. The chapter highlights the most developed research areas (that is, urban dialectology and sociolect lexicography) and emphasizes the links of the studies with the preceding tradition. Among other things, the authors mention some parameters of variation in segmental phonetics, word accentuation, and inflectional morphology discussed in the recent literature.
