FUNCTIONING OF THE CONCEPT “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE” IN THE LANGUAGE OF MASS MEDIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BASED ON THE BASHKIR, RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article presents a comparative study of the mechanisms through which scientific and technical terminology is adapted in the mass media of three typologically different languages – Bashkir, Russian and English. Drawing on print and broadcast media materials from 2005 to 2025, the paper traces the trajectory of one of the most rapidly spreading concepts of our time, artificial intelligence, from a narrow computer-science term to an element of the general socio-political and economic agenda. It is established that the basic mechanisms of term adaptation in journalistic discourse – determinologization, metaphorization and contextual explication – are universal and language-independent. At the same time, the degree and manner of their application reveal pronounced national specificity: the Bashkir language displays a persistent multiplicity of competing translation variants of the concept, the Russian language combines a fixed term form with measured explication, while the English language shows minimal explication owing to its status as the language of origin of the concept. The study concludes that mass media function as a site of primary, pre-institutional normalization of new terminology under conditions where official terminological bodies fail to keep pace with the rate of emergence of new concepts.