# All Slavic languages: "Russophile", "Russophobe"



## Ogyn

Recently, I've been wondering about these two words  - "Russophile" and "Russophobe". I'm Bulgarian and in my language they're quite common when it comes to politics and our relationship with Russia. However, you can seldom hear "Anglophile" or any other similar term. It's like "Russophile" an' "Russophobe" have acquired an entirely different, even heavy meaning, than most similar words, which is not that surprising.

So I am interested in *whether you have/ha*d* them in your Slavic language  and was there a segregation between "Russophiles" an "Russophobes" in Eastern Europe in the period between the mi*dd*le of 19th century till the First World War an*d* in which countries* ? How the terms came to be, etc ?


So, any thoughts and knowledge on the topic would be highly appreciated. Would also be interesting to see whether you have synonyms for them and how are they written. I hope I've put my point across. Thanks ! 


PS: I came across Encyclopedia of Ukraine, while I was searching for it and the origin of the words in the Oxford dictionary, but I'm interested in the topic between the two terms in Eastern Europe and what you have to say.


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## Azori

In Slovak these words do exist...

*rusofil
rusofób*

... but I don't think I've ever heard them in spoken language, in literature they would be also quite rare, I assume. I'm not aware of any other words with the same (or a similar) meaning.


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## Ogyn

Thank you for your input : ) !


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## bigic

These words also exist in Serbian (rusofil, rusofob). These two aren't commonly used in spoken language, but they are sometimes used in newspapers and especially on internet portals, blogs and comments.


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## Azori

In Czech: *rusofil, rusofob*.


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## bibax

Nowadays these two words are quite frequent, especially after the events in Crimea and Ukraine. Both words often serve as an insult and to label the political opponents. For example our president Miloš Zeman is labelled as a _*rusofil*_ whereas the defeated presidential candidate Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena Fürst zu Schwarzenberg, Herzog von Krummau, gefürsteter Graf zu Sulz und Landgraf im Kleggau is a *rusofob*.


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## Azori

I did a search in the Slovak National Corpus (without the lower/upper-case letter distinction) for words starting with "rusofil" - it includes adjectives and nouns with various case endings... and it gave... 320 results...  I wouldn't say it's a lot for written texts... For words starting with "rusofób" there were only 65 results...


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## ilocas2

Ogyn said:


> Recently, I've been wondering about these two words  - "Russophile" and "Russophobe". I'm Bulgarian and in my language they're quite common when it comes to politics and our relationship with Russia. However, you can seldom hear "Anglophile" or any other similar term. It's like "Russophile" an' "Russophobe" have acquired an entirely different, even heavy meaning, than most similar words, which is not that surprising.
> 
> So I am interested in *whether you have/ha*d* them in your Slavic language  and was there a segregation between "Russophiles" an "Russophobes" in Eastern Europe in the period between the mi*dd*le of 19th century till the First World War an*d* in which countries* ? How the terms came to be, etc ?
> 
> 
> So, any thoughts and knowledge on the topic would be highly appreciated. Would also be interesting to see whether you have synonyms for them and how are they written. I hope I've put my point across. Thanks !
> 
> 
> PS: I came across Encyclopedia of Ukraine, while I was searching for it and the origin of the words in the Oxford dictionary, but I'm interested in the topic between the two terms in Eastern Europe and what you have to say.



Czech:

russophile - rusofil, rusomil

russophobe - rusofob


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## Saimdusan

Srpski:

rusofil / rusoljubac
rusofob / rusomrzac

Najčešći su oblici ipak ovi prvi (tj. _rusofil _odnosno _rusofob_). Što se tog istorijskog pitanja tiče, pravo da ti kažem nemam pojma, ali reč _rusofil_ se i dan danas koristi u odnosu na Srbe nacionaliste.
The most common forms are these first ones (i.e. _rusofil_ or _rusofob_). As for the historical question frankly I have no idea, but the word _rusofil_ is used even nowadays with reference to Serbian nationalists.


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