Experts in the humanities and sciences distinguish between various political, economic, industrial and technological, demographic, ecological, scientific, cultural, social, legal, etc. trends specific to the development of world civilization in the 21st century. Language is one of the significant semiotic communicative systems, “a system of communication by written or spoken words, which is used by the people of a particular country or area” [9], “a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings; form or manner of verbal expression” [15], which serves to generate, work over and preserve information created and kept for thousands of years. It tends to be a unifier for the trends mentioned above and yet not described.
As of the 21st century, linguists have not come to a unanimous conception of the number of languages functioning in the world. They refer to radically different figures: from less than 3,000 to more than 6,000 languages, basically due to the ambiguity of criteria distinguishing between a language and a dialect (e.g., A. Meillet and M. Cohen in their review of world languages refer to 2,796 languages) [10]. According to some statistical data, however, only 95 languages have the status of official languages.
Throughout the development of human civilization, the language superiority of a certain language providing international communication has changed due to objective and subjective intra- or extralinguistic causes. It is well-known that in the ancient world Greek had a dominant position. Later it was replaced by Latin in Europe and Arabic in Asia, and they kept hold of their superiority till the late Middle Ages. In the 21st century one can attest to the great influence of French. The 21st century was marked by a competitive character of two models of language globalization: that of the West, which promoted and is still promoting English in the 21st century, and the Soviet Model focusing basically on Russian [1, 8-9].
In this respect, the aim of the present article is to determine the main internal and external tendencies of the development of the Russian language in the 21st century within the context of modern global synergetic trends.
The analyses of domestic and foreign statistical and scientific-analytical resources makes it possible to figuratively divide the 21st century trends of the Russian language into two types: extralinguistic and intralinguistic.