ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the unique situation of Russian speakers in South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay). Participants in the study belong to communities which had migrated to these countries from China in the late 1950s – early 1960s. Material for research was collected during expeditions conducted by the Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences, to Old Believers’ communities of South America in 2010–2014 (led by O. Rovnova). Conversational interviews in Russian were conducted with nearly 100 informants aged 9 to 90. Over 200 hours of audio recordings were complemented by ethnographic notes.
The chapter presents the history of migration and the socio-linguistic situation in the communities under study. In the analyses of dialect features special attention is given to new phenomena in the traditional dialect of Old Believers, which emerged as a result of contacts with Spanish and Portuguese. We discuss the communities’ strategies of language maintenance facilitated by tolerant language policies in South American countries.
Communicative behavior is an important indicator of the degree to which immigrant communities adapt to host cultures. It can reinforce social experience and historical memory of the “culture of fathers” but at the same time it inevitably demonstrates shifts in communicative norms caused by integration into the social and economic life of the titular nation. A case in point is the communicative behavior and traditions of Old Believers in Brazil which, although they remain stable, they reflect the influence of Brazilian communicative culture.
The chapter explores the diverse aspects of communicative behavior: tactics of identification and self-presentation, formation of categories of “our people” and “others”, as well as tabooed topics, and others. In addition, it shows the means by which a comic effect is created in Old Believers’ speech. To process and interpret the information received, discourse-analysis methods afford us the opportunity to reveal informants’ overt and concealed communicative goals were used; modeling of communicative behavior and the method of parametric description were also applied.
