Challenges in Heritage Language Documentations: BraPoRus, Spoken Corpus of Heritage Russian in Brazil

Henriques, Anna Smirnova; Skorobogatova, Aleksandra S.; Ruseishvili, Svetlana; Madureira, Sandra; Sekerina, Irina A.

doi:10.12794/langarc1851178

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Digital Language Archives: LangArc 2021 2021

DOI: 10.12794/langarc1851178

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Challenges in Heritage Language Documentations: BraPoRus, Spoken Corpus of Heritage Russian in Brazil

Anna Smirnova Henriques¹,

Aleksandra S. Skorobogatova²,

Svetlana Ruseishvili³

et al.

Abstract: The Bolshevik revolution in 1917, followed by the Civil War, induced a big wave of emigration from the ex-Russian Empire. These emigrants created their “Russia Abroad”. Many Russians stayed in Europe or China, but, in the 1940s and 1950s, many of them went to the USA, Latin America and other destinations. The importance of preserving the memories and documents of the old waves of the Russian emigration is crucial. Our group is collecting a corpus of heritage Russian in Brazil, the BRAzilian POrtuguese RUSsian … Show more

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Cited by 3 publications

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Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic

Sekerina,

Smirnova Henriques,

Skorobogatova

et al. 2023

Linguistics Vanguard

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This article presents the Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus, whose goal is to collect, analyze, and preserve for posterity the spoken heritage Russian still used today in Brazil by approximately 1,500 elderly bilingual heritage Russian–Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Their unique 100-year-old variety of moribund Russian is disappearing because it has not been passed to their descendants born in Brazil. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we remotely collected 170 h of speech samples in heritage Russian from 26 participants (M age = 75.7 years) in naturalistic settings using Zoom or a phone call. To estimate the quality of collected data, we focus on two methodological challenges, automatic transcription and acoustic quality of remote recordings. First, we find that among commercially available transcription programs, Sonix far outperforms Google Transcribe and Vocalmatic on the measure of word error rate (WER). Second, we also establish that the acoustic quality of the remote recordings was adequate for intonational and speech rate analysis. Moreover, this remote method of collecting and analyzing speech samples works successfully with elderly bilingual participants who speak a heritage language different from their dominant societal language, and it can become a new norm when face-to-face communication with elderly participants is not possible.

show abstract

Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic

Sekerina,

Smirnova Henriques,

Skorobogatova

et al. 2023

Linguistics Vanguard

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show abstract

Verbal working memory assessment in Russian-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals

Skorobogatova

Henriques

Ruseishvili

et al. 2021

CadLin

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In Brazil, the learning of a second language (L2) by native Brazilian Portuguese speakers has been extensively explored, but studies on language processing and language interaction among bilinguals are quite recent. The late bilingualism of the first-generation immigrants has been studied mainly from the perspective of their difficulties in learning Brazilian Portuguese. Brazil has numerous communities of heritage speakers of many languages such as Japanese, German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. However, the number of studies that focus on the bilingual speech of heritage speakers in Brazil is also quite limited. The aim of the current study is to evaluate the working memory in Russian-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals as a function of the language and type of bilingualism. For this purpose, 49 first-generation Russophone immigrants and 28 older Russian heritage speakers, all residing in Brazil, were tested in Russian and Portuguese using a Month-Ordering task. We found that the working memory scores of the first-generation Russophone immigrants were not statistically different between both languages, but the median working memory score of the older Russian heritage speakers in Russian was 1.5-fold lower than in Portuguese. As next steps, we plan to verify the relation between the working memory capacity and narrative production abilities of the older Russian heritage-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals in their heritage and societal languages.

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Braporus, spoken corpus of heritage russian in Brazil

et al. 2022

Self Cite

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Heritage speakers represent a special category of bilinguals who are exposed to their first language at home in the childhood, but later acquire the main language of their society that becomes dominant. Brazil has numerous communities of heritage speakers of many languages such as Japanese, German, Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian; however, only few speech corpora are being collected. In the current work, we describe the protocol of the data collection and discuss some points about data management for the BraPoRus (Brazilian Portuguese-Russian) corpus, a spoken corpus of heritage Russian in Brazil. The participants are 26 elderly speakers who were born in Brazil or came to Brazil as children in the 1950s. The protocol of the data collection includes: 1) a brief sociodemographic questionnaire; 2) a working memory test in Russian and Brazilian Portuguese using the Month-Ordering task; 3) a semi-spontaneous narrative about the history of the participants’ family and their immigration to Brazil; 4) the Bilingual Language Profile; 5) a sociolinguistic interview with 139 questions; 6) unscripted dialogues between participants in Russian; 7) intonation task; and 8) reading task. The BraPoRus corpus contains more than 160 hours of speech recordings and represents a unique collection of heritage Russian in Brazil. We expect that the protocol described in this work will be useful both for Brazilian linguists who study other heritage languages, and for research on heritage Russian in other countries.

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Challenges in Heritage Language Documentations: BraPoRus, Spoken Corpus of Heritage Russian in Brazil

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic

Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic

Verbal working memory assessment in Russian-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals

Braporus, spoken corpus of heritage russian in Brazil

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