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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).
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 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). A characteristic feature of modern Russian is that the words of the triad have no neutral literary synonyms: the nearest equivalents are purely medical terms, often of Latin etymology.
Aleksey Plutser-Sarno lists 35 roots that respondents in surveys considered mat (the list includes the rude words for "to gobble" (жрать, zhrat) and "to vomit" (блевать, blevat); respondents, he adds, treated "certain other" roots as mat as well), and notes that seven lexemes are most often considered mat: besides the triad, these are blyad (блядь, "fallen woman"), mude (du.)/mudy (pl.) (муде/муды, "testicles"), manda (манда, female genitals) and yelda (елда, male genitals). It is these seven words that Plutser-Sarno proposes to adopt, as a working assumption, as the basis of the "conventional concept" of mat.
Plutser-Sarno observes that blyad stands apart among the mat lexemes: it is the only word at the top of the list that denotes neither the genitals nor copulation. In surveys it ranks second among mat lexemes (after yebat), and its root is therefore included, alongside the triad, in the "expressive core" of mat, which on Plutser-Sarno's account thus consists of four roots.
In the nineteenth century a theory was put forward that mat had been borrowed from Mongolian; it was met with criticism even at the time of its appearance. The theory has now been conclusively refuted by the birch bark letters with mat texts discovered in the second half of the twentieth century. The misconception nevertheless remains widespread: when Timur Kibirov's poem "Epistle to L. Rubinstein", which included several mat words, was first published in the newspaper Atmoda in 1989, one journalist derisively called it "an epistle from a Tatar to a Jew".
Russian mat is characterised by a "truly incalculable" number of derived words (due to the highly inflected character of the Russian language), which are continuously generated by the street speech. V. V. Raskin gives the following incomplete list of verbs formed from ебать (yebat):
On the basis of this list, Valery Mokienko concludes that "the entire word-formation paradigm of the Russian verbal lexicon" is brought into play, and notes equally extensive possibilities for deriving other parts of speech: долбоёб, ёбарь, ебатура, ебальник, заёб, мудоёб, поебон, ебливый, приёбливый, поёбанный, and so on.
The scale of word formation provides an additional criterion for delimiting the "core" of mat vocabulary: the first five to seven words in the 35-word list of mat words compiled from surveys generate several thousand derivatives, while the remainder generate only a few hundred in total.
The first volume of the Great Dictionary of Mat by the Russian lexicographer Plutser-Sarno is dedicated to expressions derived from the word khuy, numbering over 500 entries. The second volume is for expressions derived from the word pizda, numbering over 500 entries.
Some texts in birch bark manuscripts of 12th-13th centuries are interpreted as using mat.: 99–100 : 117–118 : 416–420
The contemporaneous use of mat is widespread, especially in the army, police, blue-collar workers, the criminal world, and many other all-male milieus, with particular fervor in the male-dominated military and the structurally similar social strata.
A typical use of mat is verbal aggression directed at a specific addressee whom the swearer wants to berate or insult. Mat is, however, often used by people with bad control of language for more neutral purposes as well; the mat vocabulary is then desemanticised, that is, the speaker has no intention of insulting anyone, and swears:
The tabooed status of mat often leads to the omission of words with mat roots from utterances (aposiopesis): хоть до… ("even up to the..."), ты же такой… ("you're such a..."). Euphemisms are also frequent, but Plutser-Sarno points out that, because the tabooing of mat is relatively weak and the word-formation potential of mat roots is so high, the euphemism of a mat word may be perceived simply as a more elaborate and emotional variant of the original expression.
Yu. I. Levin distinguishes the following areas of practical use of mat:
It is easy to picture to oneself the world described by [negative mat] vocabulary … a world in which people steal and deceive, beat and fear, in which "everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold", in which people fall but do not get up, take but do not give, in which they either work themselves to exhaustion or botch the work — but in any case treat work, like everything and everyone around them, with disgust or with profound indifference — and it all ends up as полный пиздец [total pizdets].
— Yu. I. Levin
On the generally accepted account, the Old Russian word mat derives from мать ("mother") as a contraction of expressions such as матерная брань (maternaya bran, "maternal abuse"), материться (materitsya, "to swear obscenely") and посылать к матери (posylat k materi, "to send someone 'to the mother'"). An alternative theory derives "mat" from the original meaning of the word mat — "voice" — that survived into the present day in phrases such as кричать благим матом (krichat blagim matom, "to scream at the top of one's lungs") and in Belarusian, a language related to Russian. Berneker and Vasmer rejected this theory (cf. the expression скакать лихим матом, skakat likhim matom, "to gallop at full tilt").
In 2013, Roskomnadzor deemed the four expressive core roots "absolutely unacceptable in the mass media": "Obscene designation of the male genital organ, obscene designation of the female genital organ, obscene designation of the process of copulation and obscene designation of a woman of dissolute behavior, as well as all linguistic units derived from these words".
Mat words were included by Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in the 3rd and 4th editions of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, which was printed four times in 1903–1909 (twice) and in 1911–1912, 1912–1914. The inclusion of rude and abusive words became an obstacle to the reprinting of this version of the dictionary in the Soviet Union for censorship reasons.
In the Soviet Union obscenity was censored in print and in the media, and could be prosecuted as petty hooliganism when used in public places. With the collapse of the Soviet Union censorship of mat stopped, and a number of writers, singers, and actors started using taboo-shattering mat in their works. For example, the singer Sergey "Shnur" Shnurov is notorious of using mat in his songs.
In modern Russia, since the times of the Soviet Union, the use of obscenities in public aggravates a disorderly conduct charge and may lead to its qualification as petty hooliganism, punishable under article 20.1.1 of the Offences Code of Russia, although there was no clear legal definition of what exactly constitutes an obscenity.
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