In recent years many teachers of Russian often come across a new and ever-growing category of students—the children of Russian immigrants who were raised in different countries outside of Russia. The knowledge of Russian among these students can vary greatly. Maintenance of one's parents' mother tongue in the second generation of immigrants depends on many factors. According to our data, attitudes towards the Russian language and the age at the time of departure from the native county are among the most important ones. It should be taken into consideration that for descendants of immigrants, the Russian language serves primarily as a means of day-to-day communication in the family. Not only has this language inherited many speech peculiarities of parents and relatives, but it is also a target for the host society's language interference.
According to the data collected during our research, which began in 1992, the Russian language of immigrants who live in the English-language environment in the United States has some clearly identifiable features.
The intonation and rhythmical structure of utterances are most vulnerable to the influence of English. We believe that instructors who teach Russian to children of immigrants should pay particular attention to the IC-1 and IC-3 intonational constructions (according to E. A. Bryzgunova), characteristics of emotional variations of IC-5, and types of emphasis of stressed syllables. It is important for children of immigrants to develop skills in Russian stress and the reduction of vowels. Cases of non-matching places of stress in English and Russian are particularly noteworthy (depozit and deposit, Va&shachek;ington and Washington). Many features that are characteristic of the accent of Americans who study Russian (as described in detail in methodological literature) are also attributes of the pronunciation of children of immigrants.
Lexical peculiarities of immigrant speech are characterized
primarily by borrowings from English that are not in use in Russia,
such as bejsmint], apojntmint, vejtris(ka). Interlingual interference
also leads to semantic extensions (for example, in immigrant speech
&shachek;torm means not only
Grammatical and syntactic interference in Russian immigrants'
speech is evident in structures calqued from English (Ja ne
znaju, esli on priedet
instead of Ja ne znaju, priedet
li on,
govorili na radio
instead of po
radio
). As a rule, children of immigrants are not familiar
with the grammar system taught in Russian schools. Even those who
speak rather fluently often do not have any idea about cases or
conjugations, and sometimes this leads to misunderstanding between
them and their teachers in Russia.
Above mentioned features and other peculiarities discussed in the report are just a small fraction of what needs to be taken into consideration while working with the descendants of immigrants who are a very special audience.