State Institute of Russian Language names words of the year

The first place went to neyroset’ (‘neural network’), which is understandable due to an explosion in popularity of this computing tool in 2023.

KFU scientists also conducted a survey of most used words in Russian search systems, and it turned out that ‘AI’ and ‘ChatGPT’ are the two leaders.

However, linguists argued that ChatGPT, being a non-Cyrillic word, cannot strictly be called a word of the year in Russian language. That’s why neyroset’ (нейросеть) serves as a compromise, being a reflection of modern tendencies and a good calque of a foreign word through morpheme-by-morpheme translation.

“We see a good example of adapting a foreign word, so the word of the year adheres to an important criterion of the nomination – being rooted in contemporary spoken Russian and having word formation relationships, such as the adjective neyrosetevoy or the colloquialism neyronka,” explains Associate Professor of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language Timur Galeev.

The term neural network has been in scientific use for quite some time – since mid-20th century. It was then when cybernetics researchers became interested in mathematical modelling of complex biological processes, including neural activity.

In the process, such terms as perceptron and cognitron came to life, but they didn’t seep into everyday speech because they were confined to specific areas of the industry. When deep learning algorithms first came to public attention in 2007, and then deepfakes in 2014, the term neural network firmly established itself in the public eye and branched into various other forms.

Dr Galeev adds, “Such changes also prove the word has acquired new semantics. Thanks to the technological revolution, the lexeme has gained new connotations, separating it both from the previous types of neural networks of the 20th century and from AI, which still has an aura of incomprehensibility, unpredictability, and sometimes even danger.”

The word of the year has been chosen by the Pushkin Institute since 2007.