Stability and instability in language: Contempopary changes in "Finland’s Russian"

Abstrakti

Russian ideology about language has an imprint on both the previous experience of Russian-speaking immigrants and stereotypes among the metropolitan Russian community. When the two meet, loaded as they are by general Russian and the new assimilated views, the confl icting interactions refl ect the search for linguistic truth: can the Russian language remain Russian without being spoken in Russia? This study attempts to establish how immigrants with Russian as their dominant language lose some of the grammatical and lexical components of their mother tongue under the infl uence of the Finnish environment; how they position themselves in the domain of language use, and the perception of this group’s linguistic abilities among native speakers of Russian living in Russia. The degree of language attrition has been documented in oral and written discourses: the self-defi nition of bilingual speakers is based on data acquired through free and structured oral interviews and via written questionnaires.