THEMATIC STRATIFICATION OF CRYPTOCURRENCY TERMINOLOGY IN ENGLISH, CHINESE AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article offers a comparative description of cryptocurrency terminology in English, Chinese and Russian from the perspective of its thematic stratification. Based on a corpus of 103 terminological units selected from dictionaries, glossaries and specialized texts, it identifies and characterizes the main thematic blocks of the cryptocurrency term system: core technological terms, the economic and trading layer, IT and cryptographic lexis, institutional and regulatory nominations, as well as zoomorphic, metaphorical and memetic units. It is shown that English functions as the primary source of nominations, Chinese forms an adaptation subsystem with a wide range of calques, transcriptions and locally motivated metaphors, whereas Russian serves as the language of reception and variable assimilation, displaying competition between different borrowing and translation strategies. The study also substantiates the view of cryptocurrency terminology as a structurally ordered, thematically stratified term system in which language for specific purposes and professional jargon interact, while thematic classification makes it possible to reveal systemic regularities of cross‑linguistic transfer and institutionalization of new terminology in a multilingual crypto discourse.