Abstract
This paper primarily focuses on the family language policy of bilingual Russian-Estonian and Russian-Spanish families in relation to the maintenance of Russian as a heritage language. Its main objective is to identify social factors that either help or hinder this process. In doing so, this paper searches for commonalities and specificities of the mainstream attitudes towards Russian as a heritage language in Estonia and Spain, by analysing the sociolinguistic situation of Russian in both countries and by examining the factors conditioning the maintenance of Russian as a heritage language in family settings. Our research is based on an in-depth analysis of a variety of sources, mainly quantitative statistical and demographic data on self-reported language behaviour and language ideologies in mixed families from Estonia (n = 40) and Spain (n = 40). The main results of our comparative study confirm the general positive attitude towards Russian as a heritage language, but they also highlight an important variability of these attitudes both between countries and within each community. We show that these attitudes directly determine the principles of family language policy, the parents strategies to transmit Russian as a heritage language, and the level of proficiency in Russian as a heritage language in the second generation. These results allow us to conclude that, as a heritage language, Russian relies on strong attitudinal support in even small communities, like Estonian or Spanish, but also that its confident transmission should rely on external subsidy.
Highlights
Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, more than seven and a half million people emigrated from the former Soviet republics in search of better social and economic opportunities
A large number of Spanish Russophones intermarried with Spaniards and are raising children with Russian as a heritage language (RHL). We focus on these two countries – Estonia and Spain – which represent the challenging socio-political cases described above
With immigrant Russians, it is assumed that speakers accept or reject maintaining and transmitting RHL in accordance with their attitudes to the country of origin and its international policies (Mustajoki et al 2020)
Summary
Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, more than seven and a half million people emigrated from the former Soviet republics in search of better social and economic opportunities. In the Baltic countries, post-Soviet languages policies of the early 1990s shaped a new social modality for the Russophone population: over the course of three decades, Russian changed from being the dominant official to being a foreign language. Our aim is to understand the principles of family language management in intermarriages in these countries and, to offer an outline of the vitality, functionality and ideological value of Russian in these under-determined sociolinguistic milieu. As sociolinguistic settings where the presence of RHL is notable, despite their vast differences, Estonia and Spain share common social and political traits In this sense, the present study provides a novel contrastive perspective on family language policy in two partially similar and partially dissimilar sociolinguistic settings. This is crucial for understanding family language policies in intermarriages: in the case of Spain, few mixed families can rely on English as a family lingua franca and this strengthens the position of Spanish as the main means of communication
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