acts as the linguistic substratum, supplying the syntactic structure into which German words are inserted. The German content varies from speaker to speaker, but can be as high as 50% of the vocabulary. The situation is somewhat akin to Spanglish in the United States. Gender may be influenced by Russian genders, as in the case of most words ending in '-ung', which are always feminine in German, but usually masculine in the mixed language because Russian nouns ending in a hard consonant are always masculine. However, some words inherit their gender from the German noun, as in the feminine какая хорошая from German feminine die Überraschung, meaning 'surprise'. A mixed language makes greater use of the uncommon Russian auxiliary verbsиметь, meaning 'to have' and быть, meaning 'to be'. The corresponding verbs are very common in German. German verbs are often treated in a sentence as though they were Russian verbs, being russified by replacing the German infinitive verb ending. -n with the Russian -. For example, German spüren becomes шпюрать, 'to feel' The following features vary from speaker to speaker:
Adopting the German terms for certain everyday items, particularly if the word has fewer syllables than the Russian equivalent.
Adopting the German terms for the realities of immigrant life, such as Arbeitsamt, Sozial, Termin, Vertrag.
Literal translation of Russian terms or phrases into German.
Using the German pronunciation of proper names rather than the 'russified' pronunciation based on transliteration into Cyrillic. For example, in Russian 'Einstein' is written 'Эйнште́йн', and pronounced. But in this mixed language would be pronounced, the German pronunciation of Einstein. Also for 'Leipzig' instead of the russified ', and for 'Freud' instead of.
There is at least one example of a neologism. Arbeits'слёзы, pronounced arbaytslyozy, could be a form of the German wordArbeitslosengeld. The word has undergone an interesting phonetic and semantic shift. Casual or incomplete articulation of Arbeitslosengeld may be vocally realized as Arbeitslose, meaning 'an unemployed person', but the word takes on a new meaning because the Russian word слёзы means 'tears'. The resulting word in a mixed language, Arbeits'слёзы, means 'unemployment pay' but it might be better translated as 'unemployment pain'.
