ABSTRACT
This chapter 'Translit', from Digital Russia, an investigation of the language policies, epitomizes a key challenge for the Russian language community in the post-Cold War era. The chapter translit are mainly linguistic, technological and cultural. The three aspects of Russian computer-mediated digraphia key to understanding the phenomenon the metalinguistic reactions to the phenomenon by technological constraints implications for the linguistic characteristics of translit. The digital technology and computer-mediated communication (CMC) seems to have re-actualized digraphia as a research object. The most common way of rendering text in the early development of digital technology was through the ASCII standard, tailored to the English language. The technical reasons for the rise of translit and the appearance of a digraphical situation are based on the fact that the digital technology today has been developed in an English-language setting. The magnitude of the phenomenon means that the study of translit and the Russian computer-mediated digraphia is important for our understanding of contemporary Russian.
