Social and Speech Portrait of a Descendant of Russian Immigrants to the Chinese Three Rivers Region in the XX Century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of a language functioning in foreign countries, outside its metropolis. This is a special form of language existence. The study is made in linguistic personology aspect: the factors of preservation of the native language in the speech of several generations of emigrants are identified by the means of analyzing the language competencies and the specifics of the native language of representatives of the foreign diaspora. The purpose of this article is to create the speech portrait of the representative of the East emigration, the descendants of Russian emigrants in China, the Chinese Three Rivers region, to identify the characteristics of preservation of the Russian language in conditions of the Russian-Chinese bilingualism in this area. The object of the speech portraiting was the linguistic personality of a descendant of Russian immigrants to China in the beginning of the 20th century, currently a resident of the city of Labudalin, Argun city district of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous region in China. Scientific novelty of the research consists in undertaking for the first time the analysis of a fragment of the Russian linguistic reality in one of the places of the Russian diaspora in the 20th century, in the Chinese Three Rivers region, and in the introduction record of oral speech of the representative of the descendants of Russian in Three Rivers Region, carried out during the scientific expeditions to China in 2017 and 2018, that makes a unique material. The study of the Russian language in foreign countries, namely in the Eastern abroad, in the Three Rivers region, is a contribution to linguistic emigrantology, which determines the relevance of the study. The authors analyze the speech of a representative of the descendants of Russian settlers in the Chinese Three Rivers Region at all levels of the language system, reveal the facts of phonetical, grammatical and lexical interference in Russian speech under the influence of the Chinese language, as well as the dialectal features preserved in it, and come to the conclusion that Russian language is highly preserved even in the third generation of immigrants from Russia to China and the authors name the sociolinguistic factors of this preservation: family, educational, professional, psychological, etc.