Stages of Development of Bilingualism of Russian Germans in the Situation of the Foreign Language Environment

Abstract

The problems of forms of the language existence are of great importance in modern linguistics. Domestic and foreign studies of recent decades point out that despite the large number of works devoted to the study of language variability, many questions related to the study and description of heterogeneity of the linguistic continuum still remain relevant. The relevance of the presented study is due to the general linguistic, historical-linguistic and sociolinguistic significance of the German island dialectology related to the study of development and functioning of the German dialects in a foreign-dialect, foreign-language and foreign-national environment and the need to in-depth study the regions of compact residence of ethnic Germans in Russia. The article analyzes the main stages of formation and development of bilingualism of Russian Germans in the former Soviet Union, in particular in the Kirov region, and explores the nature of German-Russian bilingualism of Russian Germans. The Kirov region was not chosen by chance, since Russian Germans here do not form a closed community and do not belong to autochthonous ethnical groups, but they were deported from the Volga region, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine in the 1940s. We believe that this article will be of interest to scientists involved in problems of German island dialectology.