What does one do when confronted with an object or idea alien to one's culture? What does one call it? The most natural thing, of course, is to borrow the name from the language of the culture whence it came. Which is why both futbol and gamburger have sat happily in Russian dictionaries – until now, that is. Check out the latest bill from Russia's parliament, the Duma: its aim is to ban the "unnecessary" usage of foreign words (in cases where there is a pre-existing Russian counterpart). Linguistic trespassers will be prosecuted with a hefty fine.

Russian, of course, is not the only language struggling to preserve its lexical purity. The most striking example is Icelandic, whose thesaurus hasn't changed much since the 12th century. Croatia's puppet Nazi regime (NDH, or Independent State of Croatia) attempted not only to cleanse itself of "undesirable" elements such as Serbs, Jews and Roma, but also its language of "foreign" words. Thus, the official title of NDH's leader, Ante Pavelić, was not Führer, but poglavnik (derived from glava – head), and instead of partisans there were ustaše (from ustati – to rise up). But despite strenuous efforts throughout its history, Russian is riddled with loan words – from Old Norse through Dutch, French and Turkish, all the way to modern English. Which is, of course, what makes it a living, breathing language. And it doesn't just borrow, it lends too: most English speakers are probably familiar with words such as troika or tsar.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a clownish racist whose Liberal Democratic Party's policies are as far from liberalism or democracy as they can get, proposed "cleaning" the Russian language of supposedly unnecessary borrowings last year – mentioning words such as singl, butik and performans – though it didn't get much traction then.

This time, however, it looks serious. The bill has already been supported by the Duma's committee for culture led by Vladimir Bortko, a member of the Communist party and a well-known film director. It's still a long way from becoming a law, though. And even if it does, how exactly are the authorities supposed to enforce it? The piece announcing the bill on Interfax, one of Russia's leading newswires, contains at least 31 foreign words such as shtraf (fine), deputat (deputy) and kodeks (code). Were the law to come into force the newswire could be hit (since Interfax is a yuridicheskoye litso – a legal entity as opposed to an individual person – the shtraf is supposed to be 10 times larger) with a fine of 1,240,000 roubles (£21,100). There will have to be a comprehensive, state-approved thesaurus of allowed words against which each and every utterance is compared to gauge its legitimacy. Such a project could take years and billions of taxpayer roubles. So far it's not looking realistic.

How, for example, is one supposed to replace marketing with a home-grown term? The closest one gets to convey the same meaning in Russian, Facebook users sarcastically note, is "using lies to peddle stuff people don't need". In the past few days, Russian social networks and media have been awash with caustic humour. Slon.ru, an online business edition, tweeted the news in overtly archaic Russian, avoiding possibly criminal words such as shtraf (vira is the Old Slavic term, in case you wondered – although it is also a Scandinavian loan word dating back to the 11th century), but wasn't able to follow through when trying to ask its readers to "retweet".

Some, however, are sceptical about the media frenzy. Oleg Kashin, a prominent Russian journalist now living in exile following a brutal beating (yet to be properly investigated), argues that the surge of patently absurd bills like those banning foreign words or high heels is a tactic deployed by the Kremlin via its loyal media to draw attention away from topics that really matter – such as Russia's involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Who could have thought just a couple of years ago that laws that would make Orwell and Kafka spin in their graves would pass through Duma hearings like a hot knife through butter? Well-read Russians have already observed that the dystopian fantasies imagined by authors such as Vladimir Voynovich and Vladimir Sorokin are becoming a matter of daily routine. Let us hope their wilder imaginings remain the stuff of fiction.