The Rutul language is one of the minority languages of Russia, whose native speakers have never had their own statehood.
In different epochs, its vocabulary was actively replenished with borrowings from various languages. Over 1200 Russian lexemes, understood in a broad sense as units that came from the Russian language (regardless of whether they belong to the native Russian or are words of foreign origin in the donor language), are investigated in the article on the basis of the analysis of a number of bilingual dictionaries. At the same time, the authors of the article exclude Arabisms, Turkisms, and Iranisms from their analysis, as there is a high probability of independent borrowing into both Russian and Rutul languages. Based on the "Russian Semantic Dictionary" (Ed. by N.Y. Shvedova, 1998-2007), the distribution of Russisms to different semantic classes is considered. Hypotheses are formulated about the reasons for the uneven replenishment of diff erent classes with borrowings from the Russian language and about the degree of importance of Russisms for communicative needs of Rutulians.