A Multidimensional Analysis of Linguistic Variation in Russian and British Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

This study conducts a multidimensional analysis of Russian English to examine register variation. It explores Russian English as it appears in the editorial and opinion sections of prominent newspapers. The corpus comprises 1,250 editorials (250 from each of five newspapers), each ranging from 1,000 to 1100 words long. The corpus was carefully annotated for 67 linguistic features using the freely available Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (Nini, 2019). We employed factor analysis within Biber’s (1988) multidimensional framework to identify and interpret significant patterns of linguistic co-occurrence. These dimensions help reveal stylistic and rhetorical choices in different editorial contexts. The findings contribute to understanding non-native English varieties, particularly how Russian English reflects local and global influences. This study sheds light on how English adapts and evolves in diverse linguistic and cultural settings, reinforcing its nature as a pluralistic, global language.