The problem of the russian suffix -chane revisited (survey of the dispute)

In this paper we consider the dispute over Russian names for inhabitants of cities and regions formed with suffix -чане (-чанин, -чанка). The dispute took place in the second half of the 20th century and involved numerous linguists, writers and publicists. Some participants regarded these names as illiterate or unjustified in terms of speech culture, while others justified them as conditioned by current trends in the development of wordformation system.