Age—as One of Socio-Demographic Factors Determining the Speech Behavior of the Older Generation of Russian Germans of the Kirov Region

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, there has been a surge in academic interest in the problem of the relationship between the language and the environment, caused by great concern among scientists about the fate of national minorities in Russia and the CIS. This led to an increase in the number of studies of their history, culture, and language. The study of the relationship between linguistic diversity, the extinction and disappearance of languages is becoming the topic of numerous works at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries. The fate of languages, their current existence and future are the first priority for humanity, since the language is the philosophy of the world. It is the system of knowledge about the world embodied in its linguistic structure, in its rules. In this sense, the language is the world itself, the death of which will be an irreparable loss both for the person and for the world. The purpose of this article is to present the results of the study of the speech behavior of the German ethnic minority of the Kirov region, which reflects the features manifested under the influence of sociodemographic factors in the foreign language environment, in particular, under the influence of the factor "age". The following methods are used in the work: field methods when collecting linguistic materials; the method of continuous fixing of dialectological materias with subsequent transcription of texts; the method of sociolinguistic questionnaire and interviewing of the questioned, etc. Using these methods when analysing the material allows to consider the detected phenomena with a high degree of objectivity and reliability. As our studies show, the distribution of the areas of use of German and Russian among ethnic Germans of the Kirov region, as well as the choice of the language as a native language, are largely determined by the age of informants-speakers. We believe that this article will be of interest to scientists involved in problems of German island dialectology.