Lexical features of Russian speech of bilinguals in Germany and monolinguals in Russia: an experimental study

Abstract

The results of the comparison of lexical features of Russian speech of four groups of respondents are presented: 1) adult Russian-German bilinguals aged 35-50 who moved to Germany in the 1990-2010s; 2) their children aged 10-15 who were born in Germany or moved to Germany at an early age; 3) adult monolinguals aged 35-50 living in St. Petersburg; 4) their children aged 10-15. The relevance of the research is, on the one hand, in the importance of studying the state of the Russian language in the families of Russian compatriots living abroad, its preserving and developing, and on the other hand, in the need to supplement the existing data on the speech development of bilinguals with new facts. The research is aimed at comparing lexical features of Russian speech of two generations of bilinguals in Germany and monolinguals in Russia. The material of the research includes transcripts of picture story recordings from the book of M. Mayer “Frog, where are you?”. The methods of the research are observation, data systematization and statistical processing, comparison, quantitative and qualitative interpretation of data. The authors found out the average proportion of lexical norms violations in the stories of informants and among them the proportion of word substitutions, word omissions and superfluous words insertion. The types of word substitutions, their percentage, and their reasons were determined. The similarity of lexical norms violations in the speech of children (bilingual and monolingual), conditioned by general laws of speech development, was revealed. The conclusion is made about the relatively stable Russia lexical system in the diaspora, at least in the two groups of Russian-German bilinguals studied, and about its similarity with the lexical system of monolinguals. Some parts of the lexical system of the Russian language of bilingual children aged 10-15 years undergo changes, but these changes do not violate its integrity.