Socio-demographic parameters and speech behavior of Russian Germans in foreign-language environment (as exemplified by the ethnic German minority in the Kirov Region)
Abstract
Over the past 20 years, academic interest in the relationship between language and environment has significantly increased due to mounting concern about national minorities living in the territory of Russia and the CIS. As a result, numerous studies have been conducted on their history, culture and language. Linguistic diversity and extinction of some languages became the research subject of numerous scientific works at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The fate of languages, their current state and future is top priority for humankind since language is a system of knowledge about the world that embodies the global philosophy in its linguistic structure and grammatical rules. In this sense, language is the world itself and its extinction will cause irreparable damage to people and their surrounding environment. The article aims to present the results of studying the speech behavior of the German ethnic minority living in the Kirov Region. The conducted research reflects the specific features manifested in foreign-language environment under the influence of social and demographic factors. The authors of the article use the following methods: field methods for collecting linguistic materials; the method of continuous recording of dialect materials with the subsequent transcription of texts; the method of sociolinguistic questionnaire and interviewing, etc. While using these methods for analyzing the above-mentioned materials, the authors ensured a high degree of objectivity and reliability. According to their studies, the distribution of German and Russian among ethnic Germans living in the Kirov Region, as well as the choice of their native language, is determined by various extralinguistic factors, in particular, social and demographic: age, education, marital status and gender. The authors believe that this article will be of interest to scholars studying island German dialects.
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References
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