Acronyms in contemporary Russian banking and medical terminology

Abstract

The present study examines abbreviations in Russian banking and medical terminology. Although this form of compressive word formation has been common in Russian as early as since the beginning of the 20th century, it has become particularly productive in modern specialized languages. Our corpus includes the 2021 annual report of a Russian bank and the guidelines issued by Saint Petersburg in April 2020 for controlling the coronavirus epidemic. We manually extracted abbreviations from these two documents and categorized them by type, origin, concept groups, and language use. Our analysis revealed that initialisms pronounced as individual letters, as well as abbreviations formed primarily from the names of institutions were the most common in both languages. The main semantic groups of abbreviations are the names of various banking operations in banking and the names of diseases and procedures in medical language. Medical language abbreviations are mainly formed from the initial letters of Russian loan translations of English multi-word terms, but recently they have begun to include English abbreviations written in Latin. A similar trend has been observed in banking terminology in the past. Most of the abbreviations highlighted in the documents are used in a narrow professional context.