The report is devoted to the analysis of the phenomena of approximation and hedging in the language and the specifics of the use of pragmatic markers-approximators in everyday Russian speech (kak by, tipa, ili tam, vlode etc.). Such markers show the speaker's uncertainty about what he is talking about or is using when the direct naming of an object, phenomenon or situation is redundant, inappropriate, or impossible. Markers-approximators are one of the varieties of hedging, i.e., the use of words (units) of “cautious” modality – indefinite pronouns or adverbs, as well as introductory words that mark the speaker's uncertainty (neskol’ko ‘some’, koe-gde ‘somewhere’, vidimo ‘probably’, kazhets’a ‘seem’ etc.). Both strategies – both approximation and hedging – are aimed at weakening the illocutionary force of the statement, they equally make the statement vague, partially relieve the speaker of responsibility for what was said and soften the categoricalness of his statements. The study was conducted on the material of the spoken subcorpus of Russian National Corpus. Its results can serve as material for works on colloquial studies and are also important in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language and in the practice of translating Russian literary texts into other languages.