Russian profanity
term for strong obscene profanity in Russian
Mat, matershchina, mat language (Russian: мат; матерщи́на / ма́терный язы́к, romanized: matershchina / materny yazyk) are the Russian terms for highly vulgar, obscene, or profane language in Russian and some other Slavic language communities. A person who uses mat profusely is called matershchinnik (матерщинник).
Basic lexical units
Mat is usually defined in terms of its lexical composition. The scholar of mat Yu. I. Levin defines mat ("obscene expressions") as "relatively complete" segments of speech containing at least one obscene root. According to Levin, the roots can be enumerated, with the core consisting of "three universally known mat roots", but the boundaries of the list are blurred. Precise criteria for inclusion cannot be formulated, because in the end mat is whatever native speakers judge to be mat, and some disagreement is unavoidable: the word gondon (гондон, rude for "condom"), for instance, is felt by some speakers to be mat and by others not.
A typical list of mat roots contains four to seven items. Russian mat words are Slavic in origin, entered the language from colloquial speech, dialects and jargon, and relate to the sexual sphere of life.
The obscene triad
The base of Russian mat vocabulary is the "obscene triad", found in many languages: the male sexual organ (хуй, khuy), the female sexual organ (пизда, pizda) and the verb describing copulation (ебать, yebat).
“Russian profanity” enters the record as term for strong obscene profanity in Russian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Russian, profanity and term can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Russian profanity” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.