PassionForRussian.com

Warning: this post is written under the assumption that you already know something about Twitter. Learning the English and Russian Terminology for Twitter at once may be overwhelming.

Well, now that I’m on twitter, (follow me!) I wanted to write a simple post about twitter terminology, по-русски. But it’s turned out to be more difficult than I thought! There wasn’t much information out there, and there was a lot of disagreement amongst what I did find.

A simple Google search for твиттер didn’t turn up much. The Russian Wikipedia article was the most helpful. It used твитнул as the past tense of the verb, to tweet, and stated that a twitter user (tweep, in English, if ya didn’t know) is called a твиттерянин (or твиттеряне for plural).

Another good site I found was RuTwitter.com, which has a page called Что такое Twitter (which I like to translate as “What the heck is Twitter”). I didn’t get a lot of new terminology from this page, but it does have a list of Russian tweeps – I mean твиттеряне, if you’re looking for Russian-speakers to follow.

For more help, I turned to my own tweeps, where there was some disagreement. I think that’s understandable considering American newscasters are still chuckling to each other while trying to figure out what Twitter is, and where those Twitters go.

The general consensus for the word tweet, as a noun is simply the transliterated form, твит. (But I also saw запись and короткое сообщение.) One tweep recommended чирикать as the verb form, which literally translates as chirp or twitter.

Next, of course, the word, follow. My favorite is again the nice and simple, фолловить. But again, we have more options: следовать, следить, наблюдать, and добавить (to add).

It made me chuckle, but I even saw the term “фоллоу фрайдей”. (Doesn’t Russian have its own word for Friday?) And the website, Mир Tвиттерянин (World of Tweeps?) has a page called Tвиттинг.

So if you’re on Твиттер, please фолоувите меня! And if you have anything to add to this post, please comment! I am still a little confused about which are the best words to use! (Corrections also welcome.)

Also, a big спасибо to the tweeps who helped make this post possible: @StephenMJr, @kmaratte, @Imanotherstar, and @diman_dnk – Спасибо!