Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Minority Language Education In Russia: An Example Of Social And Cultural Reproduction And Correspondence Theories, Nadezhda Braun

Russian Language Journal

Russia is an incredibly diverse country, both linguistically and ethnically. However, Russia is often presented, and presents itself, as a monolith. Russia’s approach to minority language teaching further perpetuates this monolithic view by creating a hierarchical language structure with Russian at the top. This hierarchy is created through societal pressure, language requirements in the Russian education system, and the minimization of minority language instruction, in direct contrast to best practices for language instruction. Chuvash in Chuvashia and Nenets, Khanty, and Selkup in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug serve as examples of this linguistic hierarchy. This paper uses social and cultural reproduction …

"Russian Overseas Flagship" И Языковая Ситуация В Казахстане, Элеонора Д. Сулейменова

Russian Language Journal

The image of Kazakhstan as a multilingual country is associated with the metonymic identification of its constituent ethnic groups and 117 local languages. The dynamics of the linguistic situation (1970-2019) indicate a strong tendency towards linguistic homogeneity. Ethnic groups at demographic risk, divorced from their historic homelands, are immersed in a rapid shift towards the Russian language. The demonstrated vitality of the languages of individual ethnic groups is related to the specifics of their respective proficiencies in Kazakh and Russian. Evidence of the emergence of a regional variant of the Russian language is cited and carefully reviewed, but found to …

Russian Heritage Language Speakers In The U.S.: A Profile, Olga Kagan

Russian Language Journal

Brecht and Ingold (2002) advocate systematic efforts to develop heritage language (HL) pedagogy to remedy U.S. language deficits: “…because of [heritage language learners’(HLLs’)] existing language and cultural knowledge, they may require substantially less instructional time than other learners to develop these skills. This is especially true for speakers of the less commonly taught languages” (p. 1).

Russian is one of those less commonly taught languages in the U.S. that is critically important for national security and the global economy. Since the early 1970s, when a large wave of Russian-speaking immigrants began to settle in the U.S., American universities have had …

Piloting A Dynamic Assessment Model: Russian Nominal Morphology As A Building Block For L2 Listening Development, Rimma Ableeva, Olga Thomason

Russian Language Journal

Second language (L2) Russian research identifies listening comprehension as the least developed language ability among university students and points to the importance of listening instruction in Russian programs (e.g., Rifkin 2005; Comer 2012a; Isurin 2013). For example, Rifkin (2005, 11) states that students typically exhibit an “intermediate-low level of L2 listening proficiency” after completion of a 4-year Russian program. According to Isurin (2013, 39), the survey conducted among L2 Russian learners and instructors acknowledged “listening comprehension as the most problematic area in students’ language proficiency in general.” Comer (2012a) attributes poor listening ability to insufficient teaching materials and activities as …

Lexical Profile Of L2 Russian Textbooks, Ekaterina Talalakina, Tony Brown, Mikhail Kamrotov

Russian Language Journal

Traditionally, the link between vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension has been examined through the prism of lexical thresholds and vocabulary coverage (Milton 2009). Lexical thresholds represent the most frequent words in a language (i.e., lemmas, or dictionary forms of a word) and usually come in increments of 1,000. In relation to the Russian National Corpus, knowledge of the 1,000 most frequent lemmas allows for comprehension of 60% of a text’s vocabulary, 2,000 lemmas – 69%, and 10,000 – 85% (Lyashevskaya and Sharoff 2009, v). These figures support an earlier estimation by Brown (1996, 2), who claimed (without elaborating on what …

Review: Russian Science Fiction Literature And Cinema: A Critical Reader, Alla A. Smyslova, Alexandra Portice

Russian Language Journal

Anindita Banerjee’s critical reader provides excellent insight into the development of science fiction literature and cinema in Russia from the early nineteenth century all the way to the mid-2000s. The book features four sections, each of them comprising four articles by different authors, and an introduction from the editor. The latter provides a brief but brilliant overview of Russian nauchnaia fantastika, or “scientific fantasy,” positioning it within the context of literary, social, and scientific life in the USSR, as well as outlining the existing scholarship on the topic. From the very beginning, when the genre first emerged at the turn …

Cultural Differences In Russian And American Magazine Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach, Emily Furner

Russian Language Journal

Though some may think that TRANSLATION and LOCALIZATION are two words that represent the same function, many scholars make a distinction between the two terms, and some even add a third term, GLOBALIZATION, into the mix. Translator and localization specialist Bert Esselink (1998) perhaps best defined the distinctions in these terms: Globalization […] is typically used in a sales and marketing context, i.e., it is the process by which a company breaks free of the home markets to pursue business opportunities wherever their customers may be located. Translation is the process of converting written or displayed text or spoken words …

Review Essay: Popularizing Russian Language, Michael S. Gorham

Russian Language Journal

In an era rife with complaints over the degradation of language in the face of a host of commonly cited bugaboos (inferior schools, lazy pupils, declining morals, insidious new media technologies), one can only be heartened by the fact that language and language usage continue to be a source of popular discussion and debate. Even in American culture, where reverence for the national tongue has historically paled compared to the likes of France and Russia, one can find regular language-related rubrics in both print and broadcast media (e.g. “Word on the Street” and “Week in Words” [Wall St. Journal], “On …

Великий И Могучий Олбанский Язык: The Russian Internet And The Russian Language*, Daniela S. Hristova

Russian Language Journal

The worldwide proliferation of the Internet as a fundamentally new media technology has coincided with a radical social and linguistic liberalization in Russia. This junction changed drastically the interrelationship between the standard language and the non‐standard language varieties. A paradigmatic manifestation of the new Russian linguistic reality is the prevalent Internet trend of alternate spellings and non‐normative lexical use. The phenomenon is frequently referred to as an “Olbanian” language and associated with the counter‐culture of the so‐called “padonki.” Disregarding the fundamental principles of Russian orthography, spelling, and even morphology, the padonki have created an idiom that seemingly allows complete freedom …

Birth Language Attrition And Reacquisition In Russian Adoptees, Avram J. Lyon

Russian Language Journal

The wave of adoption from Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union has brought a large number of incomplete Russian speakers into the United States; over 71,000 orphans from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus have been issued United States entry visas since 1992 (U.S. Department of State 2007 and 2009; Ruggiero 2007). This is part of a larger trend toward international adoption, amounting to several hundred thousand children in the past decades. Children adopted by American families experience a radical reduction in birth language exposure and must quickly acclimate to and become proficient in the language of the …

Писатели О Языке: Contemporary Russian Writers On The Language Question, Ingunn Lunde

Russian Language Journal

Post-perestroika Russian society exhibits a pronounced concern with the language question. Linguistic issues are discussed at all levels of society, and a great many people engage in these debates: politicians, philologists, teachers, journalists, writers, students, bloggers, and others. Newspapers and journals feature columns or article series devoted to language; conferences discuss “the state of the Russian language”; the state sponsors a large number of radio and television programmes on language and language culture; various centres and institutions offer programmes promoting linguistic cultivation; there are information services on linguistic questions on the Internet; many blogs deal with the language question.

Introduction To Volume 58

Russian Language Journal

It was the Russian linguist, Grigorii Vinokur, who first introduced the term “kul’tura iazyka” or “language culture” to Russian in his writings on the changes taking place in the Russian language in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution (Kul’tura iazyka [Moscow 1929]). Loosely defined as language production at all ranges of the discursive spectrum, the term provided Vinokur with a useful heuristic for writing about language in flux in a manner that took into account not just the high-end linguistic production of belles-lettres, but also the everyday language use (and abuse) of more mundane, but equally influential sources – including …

On The Satirical Counter-Discourse Of Processed Cheese, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke

Russian Language Journal

The post-Soviet period presents an illuminating picture of competition taking place between different public discourses for meaning construction and articulation. It has been observed that after an initial period when the public narrative of the nation experienced fragmentation, and, using Pierre Bourdieu’s term, went through a period of heterodoxy during the last decade―roughly corresponding with the presidency of Vladimir Putin―it has displayed the growing characteristics of orthodoxy, with its centrally produced “common sense” meanings and assumptions.

Introduction To Volume 57

Russian Language Journal

Volume 57 of Russian Language Journal presents a distinguished set of U.S. and international research studies and reports reflecting the three major directions of RLJ: two significant contributions in the area of the description of contemporary standard Russian; two new works in the area of Russian language policy (one a corpus study, the other a status report); four new empirical studies on the acquisition of Russian as a foreign language by adult English-speaking learners; and two valuable studies ― one American, one Russian ― on recent changes affecting Russian in the foreign language classroom environment.

Introduction To Volume 56

Russian Language Journal

In his recent study of the linkage between corpus and status planning in language policy formation, Joshua Fishman observes that “languages are increasingly viewed as scarce national resources (not unlike flora and fauna, agricultural or environmental resources, and all other such improvable or alterable resources whose quality can be influenced by planned human intervention).” Given the particular history of language policy development in Russia and the former Soviet states in the 20th century, the appearance in mid-2005 of the new Law on the State Language of the Russian Federation is an event of considerable potential impact on the study and …

Russian As The National Language: An Overview Of Language Planning In The Russian Federation, Joan F. Chevalier

Russian Language Journal

In June of 2005 the federal legislation On the national language was signed into law by Vladimir Putin.1 The bill, revised and renamed several times after its initial introduction in the Duma in 2001, proved to be highly controversial, stimulating lively public debate. The law merits discussion as the first major piece of federation legislation focused on language policy and language planning to appear in the Russian Federation in several years. The law addresses both language‐status planning, which concerns the status and function of the Russian language, and language corpus planning, which attempts to affect changes in language forms and …

“The State Turning To Language”: Power And Identity In Russian Language Policy Today, Lara Ryazanova‐Clarke

Russian Language Journal

The first years of the twenty‐first century in Russia saw a considerable rise in the state’s regulation of language. In the words of one of the agents of this regulation, Natalia Liashchenko, a Consultant for the Committee for the Nationalities, “Определенный поворот к проблемам русского языка произошел и в органах государственной власти России.” The engagement of the state by way of regulations in the national discussion of the nature and quality of the Russian language demonstrates ‘the state power turning to language’.

Globalization, Internationalization, And Language Learning In Russia, Liudmila Verbitskaya

Russian Language Journal

In reviewing international trends over the last few decades, two words— globalization and internationalization—inevitably come to mind. Thinkers around the world are pondering these processes, which are rooted in the technological and social changes of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The notions of globalization and internationalization are obviously related, but exactly what do they mean? In The Globalization of Higher Education, Peter Scott (1998a) concludes that not only are the words not synonyms, but the processes they denote are radically different and even dialectically opposed.