Global Russian: between decline and revitalization

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editor-in-chief and the editorial board of Russian Journal of Communication, the technical-support staff and the anonymous reviewers for their help in preparing this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Linguistic identity does not always correlate with language practices and proficiency (see Bowring, 2014; Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Yelenevskaya & Fialkova, 2003), so the quoted numbers have to be treated cautiously.

2. Emigration to the USA, Germany, Canada and Finland still remains the most popular destinations (Semionova, 2015). In 2014, 36% of the emigrants headed to both Americas, 28% to Europe, 24% to Asia, 7% to Africa and 5% to Australia and Oceania, http://evroportal.ru/immigratsiya/samyie-populyarnyie-stranyi-dlya-immigratsii-iz-rossii-v-2014-godu/, 25 January 2014).

3. By Russian-speaking diaspora we mean ‘accidental diaspora’ of the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) (Brubaker, 1996), returning diaspora in Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Poland and immigrant communities that have formed in many countries of Europe, North and South Americas, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Virtually all Russian-speaking diasporic communities today are multi-ethnic. Their motivation for migration and allegiances differs, and the use of the Russian language and conscious or unconscious affinities with the Russian and Soviet culture are the chief common denominators of these diverse groups.

4. In Israel, for example, 13,000 immigrants of the 1990s were classified by the Ministry of Absorption as researchers (Kheimets & Epstein, 2001). The state launched special programmes aimed at integrating immigrant researchers but only a small number of those managed to find permanent jobs in academia.

5. According to the journal Русский язык за рубежом (Russian Language Abroad), Russian is taught as a foreign language in 90 countries (http://www.russianedu.ru/learnrussian/metodics/view/2.html, 18 August 2014). The number of private schools and learning centres outside the nation is difficult to document, because not all of them maintain ties with Russian institutions promoting the Russian language abroad. Self-reported information about centres functioning in 72 countries on all continents can be found at http://bilingual-online.net, 25 August 2014. Arefiev points out that the list on this site is far from being complete. According to the data provided in 2010 in the near and far abroad, there were as many as 16,000 schools. But even this number may be inaccurate (Arefyev, 2012, p. 383).