The Russian language maintenance and language contacts

Abstract

In our introductory article, we outline the main sociolinguistic features of Russian as a heritage language of post-Soviet immigrants in European settings and beyond. We offer a general overview of the evolution of Russian as a global language, with a particular focus on its geodemographics and economic and social value as a lingua franca . Based on this, we analyse the main principles defining the maintenance of Russian as a language of migration and as a heritage language in different countries, and emphasise the most important questions that still need to be addressed in this field of research. The main objective of this special issue is to combine the most recent research on the vitality of different languages of post-Soviet republics in new political milieu, with a particular focus on European and Asian countries, but there are other objectives as well. We propose to explore the factors that have either favoured or hindered the maintenance and transmission of languages of post-Soviet immigrants and repatriates, and how these sociolinguistic processes become evident in language vitality on both private and public levels. Our special issue primarily addresses the questions of family language policy, new language contacts and their management, and linguistic landscape in heritage speakers, diasporas and their new settings in Europe, Asia and the US.

Internal migration and changes in language repertoire among Sindhi youth

“…Regarding language adjustments by parents, the study provides the case of Russian parents who rely on individuals, family, and community resources to promote the heritage language and are fluent bilinguals. Similar findings were provided by Zabrodskaja (2021) who reported that there were multiple factors responsible for language maintenance of Russian as a heritage language in different contexts; these can be internal or external or both. However, the study also reported families from Ukraine who were unsuccessful in promoting their heritage language due to the lack of ethnic resources.…”

“…Language shift in multilingual societies and the globalized world is a common phenomenon (Eslami et al 2023, Zabrodskaja 2021. Nesteruk (2010) explored the language behaviour of young immigrant European children in USA by interviewing their parents through semi-structured interviews.…”

“…In multilingual societies, code-switching and code-mixing can involve a complex language mixing (Benchiba 2008, Kheir 2019, Zabrodskaja 2021. Soomro and Larina (2023) work on address terms by multilingual speakers in Pakistan display complex use of codeswitching terms for addressing.…”