Language Ecology in Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia: Bilingual Russian-Speaking Families in Multicultural Settings

We investigated language transmission in Russian-speaking families in multilingual settings in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden. What they have in common is their Russian-language background and the minority status of their native language. In Cyprus and Sweden, participants mainly come from immigrant and mixed-marriage communities, while in Estonia they live in a bilingual society, where Estonian is a prestigious language and Russian has low status. To investigate the complex contexts of the informants’ language choices, the language ecology theory was chosen as a theoretical framework. Particular attention was paid to similarities and differences in the three country groups under investigation. Written questionnaires and oral sociolinguistic interviews were used for data collection among Russian-speaking informants in the three countries. We asked whether Russian as the first language was (not) transmitted to the second generation and why. The attitudes towards bilingualism and Russian language transmission (including the change of these attitudes over time) – depending on the parents’ success in bringing up children bilingually – seemed to matter. Parental language choice is definitely one of the main factors contributing to successful transmission. A lot depend on whether there was a desire for integration with the dominant language community, for staying isolated and only preserving the home language or for having a balanced bilingual/multilingual approach and positive attitude towards both majority and minority languages. The socio-economic status, level of education and mother’s employment status played crucial roles in language transmission and attitudes. The linguistic repertoire of the father (minority, majority or mixed) also had an effect

How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian

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Смешение языков в семейном общении (на примере Кипра, Швеции и Эстонии)

The aim of this paper is to highlight translanguaging practices in the home among bilingual/multilingual Russian-speaking children and their parents in Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia. Multilingual families are the focus of our research: 50 in Cyprus, 20 in Estonia and 50 in Sweden. Using parental written question-naires with the focus on general background, socio-economic status and language proficiency, as well as oral semi-structured interviews and ethnographic participant observation, our study attempts to describe how family language policy is managed through translanguaging and literacy activities in multilingual Russian-speaking families in three different cultural and linguistic environments. Our results show both differences and similarities among Russian-speakers in the three countries, not only in their family language practices, but also in their attitudes towards the fluidity of language, language repertoires, translanguaging and Russian-language literacy. Russian-speakers incorporate a wide range of language repertoires in their everyday lives. Sometimes, such language contacts generate power struggles and the language ideological dimension becomes a key terrain to explore how speakers feel about the need to effectively attain a degree of multilingualism. Multilingualism and the maintenance of the Russian language and culture are usually encouraged, and parents often choose the one-parent-one-language approach at home. However, not all families make conscious choices regarding specific language management and may have “laissez-faire” attitudes to the use of languages in the family. We show how family language use and child-directed translanguaging can support, expand and enhance dynamic bilingualism/multilingualism, and reinforce and integrate minority language in a wider context: societal and educational

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations

И собачка... jagade bort кошку: : О некоторых особенностях нарративов двуязычных детей в Швеции

Relevance: Research on the narratives of bilingual children is extremely important, as it shows the child’s full linguistic competence, which in turn will allow teachers and educators to choose the appropriate program. The purpose of this article is to analyze the narratives of Russian-Swedish billing children. The author examines both mistakes (or “innovations”) and strategies that are used by children with a lack of lexical and / or grammatical means. An attempt will also be made to explain the cause of the observed phenomena. Description of the research progress: The study involved 25 Russian-Swedish bilingual’s children aged from 4.5 years to 9.2 years. The material for this study was collected using a specially developed tool for collecting narratives Litmus MAIN (The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). In addition to storytelling from pictures, spontaneous speech data and ethnolinguistic observations were collected. Results: The study showed that many children were unfamiliar with the Russian equivalent of Swedishwords and often used gestures when they did not know the word. Swedish was often used for metalinguistic comments and questions. Children were prone to lexical innovation and changing the meaning of words. They often mixed synonyms or lexical units close in meaning or sound. Children with weak Russian language had cases of transfer, as well as the following grammatical errors: incorrect case endings, mistakes in choosing the verb gender, the use of an incorrect preposition and case form, errors in using an accusative instead of a locative and errors in the form of a verb. Conclusion: Considering the features of children’s narratives, the author shows how the lack of input and dominant language affects their stories. Since language acquisition in Sweden takes place in a specif iccontext, the input is often limited to situations that the child encounters in daily life. In this regard, parents and teachers of their native language need to find more opportunities to practice the Russian language. It is necessary to create language situations in which children will want to talk about what happened to them. It is important for parents and teachers to try to motivate the child to tell it in Russian, to find time to play together, listen to the child, engage in joint activities and help find lexical means to express their thoughts

The Acquisition of Russian in a Language Contact Situation : A Case Study of a Bilingual Child in Sweden

This case study investigates the acquisition of Russian in a language contact situation. It examines a simultaneous Swedish-Russian bilingual child born and raised in Sweden. Qualitative analysis is provided from age 1;4 to 8;5 focusing especially on the earliest stages (before the end of the critical period at 4;5). The aim was to investigate (a) whether the child reaches the same milestones as monolingual children, (b) whether there is evidence that two separate linguistic systems have been developed, (c) whether the child’s grammatical competence in both languages might be qualitatively different from that of monolingual children and (d) whether there is interaction between the languages. The hypothesis tested is that ample input is needed to construct and develop two linguistic systems on a native-speaker level. The main result is that the two linguistic systems do not develop independently from each other; rather, 2L1s develop in permanent interaction where the weaker language – Russian – happens to be influenced by the stronger one – Swedish. The bilingual environment per se might lead to decreased structural complexity in the weaker language. Language dominance is viewed as a major determiner of cross-linguistic effects. This could lead to the development of a new individual variety of Russian (outside Russia).   The results confirm the hypothesis that, even though there was exposure to both languages from birth onwards, the amount of input in the weaker and grammatically more complex language (Russian) received before the cri­tical period was not enough to completely develop full native command of it. The lack of input has an impact on the acquisition of morphology: some morphological categories may have been set randomly or not at all. The structures observed are more ty­pical of L2 than L1 ac­quisition. Morphology may be considered a vulnerable domain since complex mor­phological rules in Russian cannot develop with­out ample input

Holistic Constructions in Heritage Russian and Russian as a Second Language : Divergence or Delay?

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the strategies applied by young learners of Russian when naming a word in a vocabulary test. A total of 40 children took part in the experiment: 10 simultaneous Russian-Swedish bilingual children and 10 successive Russian-Swedish bilinguals who lived in Sweden, 10 children who moved to Russia and acquired Russian as a second language, and 10 monolingual Russian children living in Russia (as a control group). All the children were tested with the Russian version of Cross-Linguistic Tasks (CLT; Nenonen, Gagarina 2016). The results showed that the error pattern in all the groups of children seemed to be similar; yet, the acquisition of some structures appeared to be delayed in Russian Heritage Language (HL) children. Holistic constructions are common for all the children, but in bilingual children the effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) were also noticed. We argue that â\u80\u98atypicalâ\u80\u99 construction does not necessarily need to be disordered since the two languages of the HL child develop in contact with each other. However, a pattern of delayed acquisition can later lead to divergent development in the weaker language of bilingual children

Family language policy leading to multilingual home literacy environment : Evidence from interviews with Russian-speaking mothers in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden

This paper investigates family language policies which lead to multilingual HLEs, based on the example of Russian and majority language speaking families in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden. The main aim of the investigation is to determine differences and similarities, and whether, most importantly, translanguaging and various extralinguistic and sociolinguistic factors, such as heritage language use, maintenance and transmission, linguistic and cultural identities, heritage language attitudes, heritage language status, and quality and quantity of input, affect the development of home language literacies among children in immigrant and minority settings. These families provide a very interesting setting for investigating the relevance of language attitudes and ideologies. In Sweden and Cyprus, Russian is used in immigrant communities (in Cyprus, Russian is the largest In Estonia, Russian is used as an L1 among one-third of the population, is now a minority language and was formerly the sociolinguistically dominant language. The understandings of Russian use in the HLE are linked to various ideological discourses and social practices, as well as differential motivations. In these micro-level settings, we can observe the contrast between top-down policies and bottom-up practices. Thus, this article provides an analysis of family language ideologies in three different contexts where multilingualism occurs and investigates how families modify their family language policy, creating multilingual HLEs in response to their linguistic environments. We show that despite dissimilar external environments, there were more similarities than differences in Russian language use between the countries, especially in families who realised the importance of the multilingual HLE for early literacy development and Russian as heritage language transmission. The knowledge, experiences and attitudes of twenty families in each country were investigated. The method applied in our study is based on the qualitative research tradition. We highlight key features that emerge from our data in different domains of family language policy and that were detected in all three countries. Thus, we focus on what phenomena characterise a multilingual HLE and what kind of literacy habits and activities, writing and reading beliefs concerning heritage language and majority languages (Burgess et al. 2002; Weigel et al. 2005) constitute it. Russian-speaking mothers were interviewed concerning literacy opportunities, heritage language instruction and its quality, cooperation and social-emotional quality (Leseman & de Jong 1998), the literacy activities of family members and joint literacy activities involving the child (van Steensel 2006; Manolitsis et al. 2013; Manolitsis & Sarri 2019), and the role of translanguaging in the development of multilingual HLEs. Authors 1, 2 and 3 all contributed equally and should be considered co-first authors. https://doi.org/10.15626/hn.20204502 12 HumaNetten Nr 45 Hösten 2020 immigrant language).

Cultural and linguistic capital of second-generation migrants in Cyprus and Sweden

The linguistic and cultural values of migrants, as well as their attitudes and behaviour, differ from those of the host society. All resources and values can be characterised as linguistic and cultural capital, which can provide migrants with certain advantages in their new country of settlement. A heritage language (HL) and knowledge about another culture are important components of this linguistic cultural capital. It is crucial for multi-generational families to maintain their HL and transmit the culture of their heritage to help individuals gain a better understanding of their own identity. This study aims to investigate the views, attitudes, and beliefs of second-generation migrants in Cyprus and Sweden in relation to their HL, linguistic and cultural capital, factors affecting HL use, maintenance, and development, as well as their future plans and aspirations regarding HL transmission. Narrative analysis of the semi-structured interviews revealed certain differences and similarities between the countries under investigation regarding the personal reflections of the participants and their perceptions regarding the role of family language policies, home literacy environments, child and parental agency, socio-emotional well-being, local context, and other internal and external factors influencing HL use, maintenance, and transmission. Storytelling proved to be an effective method of narrative inquiry, providing a deeper insight into the complex process of HL development and support. In addition, it offered participants an opportunity to reflect on their personality, language, and culture

Translanguaging in the Family Context : Evidence from Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia

The aim of this paper is to highlight translanguaging practices in the home among bilingual/multilingual Russian-speaking children and their parents in Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia. Multilingual families are the focus of our research: 50 in Cyprus, 20 in Estonia and 50 in Sweden. Using parental written questionnaires with the focus on general background, socio-economic status and language proficiency, as well as oral semi-structured interviews and ethnographic participant observation, our study attempts to describe how family language policy is managed through translanguaging and literacy activities in multilingual Russian-speaking families in three different cultural and linguistic environments. Our results show both differences and similarities among Russian-speakers in the three countries, not only in their family language practices, but also in their attitudes towards the fluidity of language, language repertoires, translanguaging and Russian-language literacy. Russian-speakers incorporate a wide range of language repertoires in their everyday lives. Sometimes, such language contacts generate power struggles and the language ideological dimension becomes a key terrain to explore how speakers feel about the need to effectively attain a degree of multilingualism. Multilingualism and the maintenance of the Russian language and culture are usually encouraged, and parents often choose the one-parent-one-language approach at home. However, not all families make conscious choices regarding specific language management and may have "laissez-faire" attitudes to the use of languages in the family. We show how family language use and child-directed translanguaging can support, expand and enhance dynamic bilingualism/multilingualism, and reinforce and integrate minority language in a wider context: societal and educational