Language heirs: how immigrant children support Russian in the USA

Who are the language heirs? What is unusual about their speech? How to motivate them to support the Russian language? And what mistakes should be avoided? Especially for "Voices of America" This was told by Irina Dubinina, assistant professor of Russian language at Brandeis University in Boston and Maria Polinskaya, professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland.

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Imagine that a family speaks one language, but in the country where this family lives they speak a different language. A child in this family speaks the language of the family, but then, when he goes to kindergarten or school, he switches more and more to the language of his country and begins to speak less and less in his home language. And then he begins to speak this home language less and less. A language is like gymnastic exercises or playing the piano; the less practice, the less skill. Such a person who speaks two languages, and speaks one of them more poorly, is called a heritage speaker in English. There is no good term in Russian, and such people are often called heirs, linguistic heirs, or the dissonant word “heritage”.

It is very important for people to come up with names for everything. There is a name - there is a concept. And before the name “heritage” appeared, such people were simply called bilinguals. But the concept of a bilingual is actually broader than the concept of a language heir. Such heirs are the concept of a so-called unbalanced bilingual, in which one language is significantly stronger than the other. Moreover, a stronger language is the language of the country, the external environment.

The unusual feature of this hereditary bilingualism is that their dominant language is their second language. At the same time, they are, as it were, native speakers of their first, native language, but at the same time, they are not native speakers of it, because they do not speak it as well as they do in a chronologically second language. They hear less and less of the family language, and, as a rule, they do not hear monolingual speech, but a mixture of languages ​​or migrant borrowings. These are children who believe that “dachshund” and “loyer” are normal Russian words. Although, of course, the concept of a hereditary speaker also includes those who simultaneously spoke two languages, and did not learn them sequentially.

What is characteristic of the speech of the hereditary carrier? His portrait is highly dependent on age. If we take a small child born in a Russian-speaking family in America, in Israel or in Germany, this child is quite strongly surrounded by the Russian language. Maybe this is not the same language that would be at home, in Russia or in the territory of the post-Soviet space, but the child hears it enough. Therefore, the five-year-old future heir of the language is not too different from the five-year-old peer in the homeland. And then a person begins to grow and use his home language less and less, listen to him less. At a transitional age, like all children, he wants to be different from his family and all this causes a change in language.

Older heirs who have already gone to university or live independently will find it difficult to remember words - they will speak very slowly. Many people who speak to them claim that it is a pain to have to “wait for half an hour,” and that is why many parents refuse to speak their home language. It's easier to talk to children in English to get your way faster. But the less they hear, the less they speak. A certain vicious circle is formed. Very often they do not know how to read and write in their native language, and this is one of the important tasks of their education.

As a rule, adult heirs have a smaller vocabulary than people who live in Russia. They are less included in Russian culture. Such heirs do not understand jokes. We all love to tell jokes, both yesterday and 40 years ago. Telling them to their heirs is torture, because you need to explain who Stirlitz is, who Brezhnev is...

Maybe someone is now thinking: “No, my child is completely different. He understands jokes perfectly, reads Pushkin, retells Lermontov.” We are sure that such people exist. But we are talking about a statistically average heir who can say in Russian: “Grandma, I love you” and ask where the car keys are.

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The speech of the heirs is shaped not only by the borrowing of individual words or phrases. Their speech is characterized by syntactic borrowing; they directly copy constructions from the English language, which they fill in with Russian words. Everyone knows “take the bus” and “bike 20 miles”, “I hope you are healthy and in good feelings”. Lexical borrowings, besides “loyer”, are “babysitter” instead of “nanny”, “insurance” instead of “insurance”. It’s important that this is not just vocabulary, not just “let’s teach them real Russian words.” The problem is broader, because it is tracing entire structures of the English language, idiomatic expressions, and misunderstanding the nuances of words.

“Recently I told a student: “I’m so glad that you have gained weight,” and she was terribly offended, deciding that I was hinting at adding pounds,” says Irina. “And I meant that she recovered because she was sick before.”

In addition, these people are accustomed to the speech they hear at home. Therefore, they are at least one generation behind their peers in Russia. A 20-year-old person living in St. Petersburg and a 20-year-old from Washington speak completely different languages, because a 20-year-old Russian speaker from Washington speaks the language of his grandparents. They are not aware of any changes, for example, in the form of address. Nowadays in Russia it is customary to address someone by their full name without a patronymic - for example, Maria. Although, according to age, the expert says about himself, it would be more appropriate to call him by his first name and patronymic, but in modern language this is no longer the case. A Russian-speaking resident of the United States who left Russia a long time ago will insist on a first name and patronymic. They very often do not know what “you” and “you” are. All this creates a completely different look. You hear that a person seems to speak decent Russian, he has good pronunciation, but at the same time he speaks in a completely different way from what we would expect in accordance with this pronunciation.

Also, hereditary speakers often have incorrect endings in words, often producing phrases that are strange for a native speaker, even if the heir does not have an accent and his speech is intonationally similar to the speech of a monolingual native speaker. But he can say, for example: “I went to the cinema with my mother and grandmother.” The listener experiences a strange dissonance: it seems to be “his own” and he has no accent, but he says things that the native speaker would never say.

How do the heritage speakers themselves relate to their language? Are they embarrassed to talk? This largely depends on how well they speak and how much they have been hit over the head at home. People who speak their native language decently tend to recognize that they are not the same as monolingual speakers, and very often rate themselves quite low. But people who speak rather weakly and have forgotten a lot about their language, as a rule, rely on the fact that they have good pronunciation and are very pleased with themselves. The worse they speak, the better their opinion of themselves.

The second, which is very typical for the Russian-speaking environment and for the Russian diaspora in different countries, is that these hereditary carriers are often reproached in the family, they say, you are 25 years old, and you speak like a 5-year-old child. This does not inspire any inspiration and a person begins to be shy. In this regard, the Russian diaspora is quite critical of its heirs, therefore they very often close themselves, especially when they become older.

How to teach hereditary speakers? Considering that schools and even universities have very little time to convey the beauty of the language and help the student achieve the full form of the language, spending time on sentence types and case names is probably not worth it. Grammar is that nasty word that no one wants to deal with. But grammar is simply the rules for how words are organized into longer segments in phrases or sentences. Therefore, grammar needs to be taught, but not in the same way as a monolingual Russian-speaking child who came to a Russian school, has heard nothing but Russian in his life and who has many different people with whom he speaks Russian.

A lot depends on the learning objectives. Do we want them to be native speakers such as native speakers who have only one language, who live in Russia and have studied for 11 years at school? Of course not. In addition, we are dealing with people who have two languages. And the second language is better the older they are. And we need to deal with two languages, although we only teach one. The grammar and vocabulary that we teach them should be based on their bilingual personality.

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When we talk about grammar, the two concepts are often confused. The first is the idea of ​​language that every person has in his head and allows us to immediately say whether it is right or wrong. For example, if you say: “Masha is a terrible fool,” then you will immediately understand that there is something wrong with this sentence. But you won't necessarily be able to explain it. This internal understanding that every native speaker has, regardless of education, is what linguists call grammar. The second understanding of grammar is a textbook of native speech, what we studied, what people in Russia are now learning. This is something that is completely inaccessible to heirs. Therefore, the task of teaching the heir is to help him develop the internal grammar existing in his head. It sits in their head - this is an innate understanding of language. But when we develop this grammar, we need to try not to discourage their interest in the language with the help of terms (nominative case, accusative case...). It does nothing and will not help them become better speakers.

This also applies to what to read with them. If you start reading books with them where they understand individual words, but do not put them into meaningful sentences, this will also discourage you from studying your native language. Parents of many carriers are literally obsessed with having their children read Dostoevsky and other classics.

“When my youngest son went to a Russian language club in the USA in the 7th grade, they read Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time,” Maria says about her personal experience. - It was terrible. He didn’t understand at all what they were talking about, every evening his grandmother came and they tried to explain to each other why it was necessary to read “A Hero of Our Time” from the grandmother’s side and why it was not necessary from the child’s side. It all ended in tears, the grandmother was terribly upset that the child did not understand who Maxim Maksimych was, the child shouted that this was terrible and that this was not the Russian language at all. It ended with the Russian language being replaced by drumming. I realized that reading the classics would take away everything. Then we started reading Deniska’s Stories and everything went very well.”

According to Maria, the heirs are not ready and cannot use cultural quotes that we are proud of and are accustomed to using in our speech. They often come to Russian classics through translations. Therefore, if you want them to read Dostoevsky in the original, you need to start with Deniska’s Stories and Dunno or modern literature that is ideologically close to them.

According to Irina, reading is very important and necessary to maintain language. But the expert also notes that the heir children will spend most of their lives in a different language environment. And it is important to remember that they speak Russian to us, but for most of their lives they will speak another language. And reading will help them maintain their native language. But, firstly, you need to read age-appropriate literature. And before requiring a child to read Dostoevsky, you need to teach the child to love children's literature. But here the question arises: what kind of children's literature? After all, the majority of parents grew up in Soviet times, when there was a certain ideological orientation in many works of children's literature. And they don’t know how much good children’s literature appears in Russia every year. Therefore, parents need to worry about finding books that will be interesting to their children and that they can read in Russian, that suit their age and interests. And, of course, you need to grow up to the classics. Irina recommends that children aged 15-16 start reading modern literature. To read the classics, you need to have a good knowledge of not only the language, but also concepts that have long left the language. Britzka, kibitka, gendarme, policeman and similar concepts remained in the 19th century. Pushkin can and should be read, but parents will have to devote a lot of time and explain what it is about, just as our parents once explained to us in childhood what a room or a room is.

You cannot expect both from the child himself that he will go into the room with a book by Dostoevsky, understand everything and return joyful, and from the teacher who sees the child 2 times a week, that he will be able to explain and convey everything. Parents also have this responsibility. Experience shows that it is easy to traumatize a child with your pressure on the topic “let’s read something from the classics.” It is very important to find that wave, the current that will help him understand what an interesting world the book opens up.

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Is it necessary to expand your vocabulary with slang words used by your peers from Russia? Do I need to work on this? Experts think not. When you start learning a new language, you always want to speak it using slang or curse words. There's nothing funnier than speaking slang or swearing with a slight accent. And our heirs always have this accent. So it will sound terribly awkward and funny. The task is to teach them to understand what they are talking about when they come to Russia - but they will begin to understand themselves if they have a good language base. Teaching them slang will be weird. It's like wearing mittens and Louboutins at the same time.

Could a reduction in the level of criticism help motivate the speakers to speak better, be interested in the language and relate to everything more easily? From the point of view of the parent, the glass is always half empty. Home banter can hurt and hurt, which leads to the rejection of attempts to speak the language. But from the point of view of the teacher, it is always half a full glass. A monolingual American takes at least 3 years to reach the level of hereditary carriers who come to classes, plus intensive language learning by immersion or at a Russian university. Therefore, it is important for parents to understand that their children know a lot, much more than children who do not grow up in Russian-speaking families. And these children grow up, receiving Russian, from 2-4 people in their life. To grow a native speaker, you need not even a village, but a city. Everyone needs to speak the language. And given how little is given to them, they know a lot. Perhaps this motivates parents not to criticize children for their mistakes.

Correcting them when they make mistakes is useless. All children go through a stage where they make mistakes. For example, young children often think that "salt" is a masculine word and will often say, "This one is salt." They will pass this stage. It is useless to correct a child at three years old. In the same way, it is useless to correct the heir. Somewhere in your soul you may worry that they speak differently from their grandmother, or that they are not speaking quite correctly, but constant criticism and corrections will lead nowhere.

What parents can do is increase the amount of language their children have direct contact with, both spoken and written. If possible, you need to travel to a Russian-speaking environment. They will go into the yard to play with the kids and immediately learn everything they need to learn. The more time they spend in a Russian-speaking environment, the better. Raising a bilingual child is difficult. This is also a question of money, a question of language policy in the family, and the commitment of the parents themselves to maintain the language. And instead of criticizing and correcting, the best thing parents can do is to increase the child’s opportunities to hear, feel, and experience the Russian language in all its forms.

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