Russian speakers and ‘The Russian Language’ in Ireland: unity, hybridity, standard and variation

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Russian speakers in Ireland delimit and describe (their/the) Russian language in relation to representations of standard Russian. It is based on analysis of discussions conducted between speakers of Russian living in Ireland, facilitated by the Our Languages (2008–2011) research project, investigating multilingualism and sociolinguistic dispositions amid Ireland’s Russian-speaking population. Three metalinguistic orientations are foregrounded: (1) participants affirm the naturally and normatively discrete identity of ‘the’ Russian language; (2) despite this unitary identity, participants distinguish between registers and levels of relative purity in Russian; (3) participants relate generalised linguistic form to a concept of community. The interplay of these orientations – toward an essentially unitary and unifying Russian language, away from ‘improper’ forms of that language, and into reflection on collective identity – reveals a model culture of standard language within the polyglossic context of Irish society, combining the routinely claimed characteristics of generality and authenticity. The article interprets the contradictory dynamic between these characteristics in relation to a Bakhtinian concept of monolingualism and a critical conceptualisation of language community. Participants configure Russian as one among ‘our languages’ through the iterative negotiation of a tension between ideological monolingualism and actual heteroglossia.

KEYWORDS:

• Monolingualism
• Bakhtin
• standard language
• Ireland
• Russian

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Feargus Denman graduated from Harvard College in 2007 with a concentration in Social Studies and a language citation in Russian. After working in Kazakhstan for one year, he returned to Ireland to join the Our Languages research project at Trinity College Dublin, supervised by its Principal Investigator Dr Sarah Smyth. He completed his PhD in 2017 with a thesis on the ideological underpinnings to a concept of language-based community for speakers of Russian in Irish society.

Notes

2 Each year between 1996 and 2008, Irish immigration exceeded emigration; annual net outward migration was then consistent through 2015; in each year since, emigration has fallen and immigration increased. Smyth (2016) provides an overview of the Irish state's response tomultilingualism in this context.

3 The 2011 census was the first to include this question. The more recent 2016 census records a figure of 21,707. Only one language other than English and Irish could be specified, so the data exclude persons with Russian, but not (primarily) speaking it at home.

4 http://www.tcd.ie/Russian/our-languages/. Accessed April 2019.

5 Standard, codified language is generally termed literary in Russian. For example, Federation legislation affirms the role of the ‘modern literary Russian language’ in public life. All translations are my own, except where published translations are cited, as indicated in the text. Russian text is transliterated according to ALA-LC conventions.

6 The terms ‘language-N’ and ‘language-l’ are reminiscent, respectively, of Saussure’s terms ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. However, where Saussure conceives langue as actual, immanent language-N system and the proper object of a linguistic science (see “abstract objectivism” in Voloshinov 1973, 57–61, 65–71), with Bakhtin dialogicality is the essence of language-L and the utterance is the proper object of studies in language (see Bakhtin 1986a, 66–78).

7 With Holquist (Holquist 1981, 426), dialogism has come to serve as a term for Bakhtinian thought, though in Bakhtin dialogizm more often refers to the immanent polyphony characterising language-in-use than to an apposite critical or epistemological mode.

8 Haugen ([1966] 2006, 411) famously maps typical stages of language development from vernacular to standard across ‘(1) selection of norm, (2) codification of form, (3) elaboration of function, and (4) acceptance by the community’.

9 This notwithstanding, Yildiz notes ‘selective multilingualism’ as a restrictive recognition of polyglossia within the ‘monolingual paradigm’ (Yildiz 2012, 203–211).

10 The element iaz͡ychie in inoiaz͡ychie marks a species of mere language-l (in use), as distinct from language-N (iaz͡yk) properly formed.

11 English-language scholarship works from Bakhtin via translation, resulting at times in confusion in academic discussions (Shepherd 1993), thought by some to cause an ‘irreducible distortion suffered by Bakhtin in careless Western hands’ (Zbinden 2006, 13). By reflecting on certain facts of translation, however, we may achieve both a more subtle understanding of Bakhtinian concepts and a more probing discussion of Russian through English.

12 Silverstein (1979, 193) describes ‘sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use’. For the other scholars' approaches, see e.g. Gal (2006), Gal and Irvine (1995), Irvine (1995), Irvine and Gal (2000), Woolard (1998a) and Kroskrity (2000).

13 The distinction between ‘category of practice’ and ‘category of analysis’ is drawn in analogy to Brubaker’s (1996, 15–22) treatment of nation.

14 The capitalisation of Standard reflects the customary designation of recognised languages by proper nouns with uppercase initial in English.

15 Furthermore, as Yildiz (2012, 215n) notes, although Anderson ‘indicates crucial historical preconditions for the monolingual paradigm […] Anderson’s own assumptions about language(s) reveal that he, too, is caught up in this paradigm, falsely declaring, for instance, that “the bulk of mankind is monoglot” throughout history (Imagined Communities 38)’.

16 There is an extensive literature on the concept of ‘Russian world’ (russkiĭ mir) in relation to contemporary Russian political thought and foreign policy; see Byford (2012), Laruelle (2015), Ryazanova-Clarke (2014) and Suslov (2017). Russian Language Day, had been observed since 1996 by the Russian community in Crimea as a day for 'defence of the Russian language' on the birthdate of the writer Alexander Pushkin (1767–1848). With support from the Russian state it evolved into a ‘festival of the great Russian word’ (Zhmutskiĭ 2011). Since 2010, UNESCO has observed a Russian Language Day (along with days for each of five other official languages) and in 2011 the Russian Federation made it an official holiday.

17 The poem appeared in the Soviet press during March 1942. It appears in Akhmatova (1997, 124–125); the translation cited in Russkiy Mir materials is not accredited and does not appear otherwise to have been published.

18 ‘Cherez semʹdesiat͡ let posle Pobedy v Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭne ėstafetu muzhestva prinial͡ Donbass, vynuzhdennyĭ vstatʹ na zashchitu svoeĭ svobody, kulʹtury i velikogo russkogo slova [ … ] Eti stikhi – proiav͡lenie muzhestva. Muzhestva tekh, kto vstal na zashchitu Rodiny’

19 The text was originally published in the 1759 dedication to Lomonosov’s Short Guide to Eloquence [Kratkoe rukovodstvo k krasnorechiiu͡].­­­­

20 The English adjective Russian elides the distinction between rossiĭskiĭ, relating to the country Rossiia͡ as political entity-cum-geography, and russkiĭ, pertaining to culture and ethnicity.

21 The Russian Academy was established in 1783 to emulate the Académie Française. Cf. Crowley (2003, 28) on English: ‘The claim is not that there had been nothing written about “the language” before 1840, or even that there had been nothing written about the history of the language before that date. The claim is that before this period there had been no historians of the language simply because there had been as yet no “history of the language” as a field of knowledge, no discourse that could operate under such a title’.

22 The author adverts derisively to pidzhin rashen, rather than to Russian/russkiĭ language, lest such hybridisation be mistaken for a legitimate variant of the language-N.

23 Video recording was rejected because of survey respondents’ insistence on assurance of anonymity.

24 This decision reflects the aim to examine the discursive construction of claims to identity and status, rather than to situate viewpoints in relation to them. As becomes apparent below, it is often anyway impossible to encapsulate a simple, adequate response to the question ‘where are you from?’.

25 See also Irvine and Gal (2000, 37–38).

26 The term Surzhyk, along with Iazychie, has served to devalue hybrid forms at the normative boundaries of standard Ukrainian (Danylenko 2016, 81). This speaker – IIIm2 – identifies as having been born and brought up at the meeting point of three republics (now separate countries), Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. In earlier discussions, this participant further identifies as holding Irish citizenship without feeling Irish (IIm1), and as someone whose native land (rodina) is Europe (Im1).

27 Perhaps surprisingly, this same woman elsewhere proudly takes ownership of her marked Ukrainian accent in Russian (see VIf2 below).

28 Myers-Scotton (1993) outlines a model of synchronic codeswitching that posits contrasting roles of for Matrix Language (ML) and Embedded Language (EL), along with some speculation on the relationship between this interrelation and diachronic language shift.

29 Participants’ remarks on interference in these discussions focus on morpho-semantic content; there is no commentary on Russian syntactic formations as a robust, receiving matrix.

30 There is some irony in this recovery of a word originally assimilated into Russian from French. Note that Vf3 interjects with reference to her own children, where Vm2 had put the question to Vf7; this exemplifies the supposition that one voice may speak ‘our’ experience.

31 This example conforms to the Myers-Scotton Matrix Language Frame model, in which lexical morphemes become embedded before subsequent generations adopt morphosyntax.

32 Smyth (2010) notes the difficulty of determining to what extent mixing in these discussions is driven by the local anglophone context, since Russian has assimilated a large quantity of English language-l (Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade 1999) and, indeed, code mixing of Russian and English is common in the Russian Federation (Sichyova 2005).

33 This is one of the words disregarded by Smyth (2010), because they are ‘routinely included in modern dictionaries of Russian’ (335). However, just such a word – supervisor – is rejected by VIf5 on the basis that ‘people sitting around you do not understand what you are talking about, who’s a supervaĭzer’ (discussed further below). And, given careful enunciation, it is not clear that manager/menedzher are to be viewed as the same lexical item.

34 This adjective is used in that instance in Russian inflected with intonation suggesting irony, as well as the appended morpheme. In dictionaries and the National Corpus, ‘perfekt’ is not associated with the sense of unblemished completion, but is listed only as a grammatical category of aspect.

35 The child is the only minor present at any of the roundtables. On intergenerational transmission of cultural identity and Russian language maintenance among ‘generation 1.5’ children migrating to Ireland in the care of their parents, see Eriksson (2013, 2015).

36 Having lamented the imperfection in his son’s ostensibly native command of the language, the father recounts proudly that during a visit to some public monument, his son had said, ‘when I have a monument, I don’t want “Irishman” to be written there, but I want there to be written –“a Russian”’. His son demurs – ‘Well, it wasn’t entirely that way..’. – but his father insists, ‘well, it was something like that’, while another woman gibes, ‘You’ve reconsidered, have you [lad]?’ The participants seek no further input from the boy but continue at points to refer to him as an embodiment of the next generation’s experience and prospects.

37 Vakhtin, Mustaĭoki, and Protassova (2010, 5) associate ‘insular’ varieties of Russian with conservation and a decelerated rate of change in comparison to the metropolitan language. Two further categories of non-Standard Russian specified comprise contact varieties evolving in non-Russophone environments and contact varieties among immigrants to Russia.

38 The word appears to derive from German Schublade ‘drawer’. The National Corpus of the Russian Language first records it in a 1981 Russian-language work by an author from Odessa; cognates are attested several decades earlier in Polish and Ukrainian.

39 ‘Aunt Sonya’, a character created by the humourist Marian Benlenki, is described in Haaretz (Khromchenko 2006) as ‘a Jewish biddy from Odessa who teaches everyone how to live’.

40 The uvular rhotic in ‘ɣuski’ for russki reflects a stereotypical phonology of Odessan Russian, a contact variety with ‘substrate influences from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish. […] an endangered dialect with speakers concentrated in Brighton Beach, New York (and perhaps Israel)’ (Grenoble 2015, 337–338); Soviet Russophone Jews came to constitute a stable emigré community around Brighton Beach (Laitin 2004).

41 An online discussion of accentual variability in Russian begins from a blogpost opining, ‘Russian does have regional accents  …  but these accents are not culturally significant. What is significant, in fact essential, is that the speech be “educated”: accents in the right places, “correct” grammatical forms, etc.’. Among many commenters presenting as native speakers of Russian, one notes, ‘I can confirm that Russian indeed seems to be much more uniform across the vast country than one would expect if one is extrapolating from what is typical for Europe’. Another regrets, ‘One thing that’s especially frustrating is that the notion of a regional accent is largely absent from the popular psyche’ (Dodson 2010). On the construal of Russian as normatively unitary and centred in Moscow, see Kamusella (2018).

42 This individual was an exceptionally committed participant, attending five of the six sessions.

43 In the word nashi, lit. ‘our(s)’ the first-person possessive plural forms function not so much indexically, as seeming to imply a fixed denotation of ‘our people’. It is used frequently to invoke, as a single group, populations of Russian-speakers, Russians and former Soviet citizens who would otherwise be differentiated: ‘You know, somehow our faces differ. If someone walks like that, then it's one of us, but if thus, then it’s an Irish person’ (IVf4).

44 Mat derives from the Russian word for ‘mother’, a component (as in English) in signally obscene phrases.

45 IIIm1 quips on the designation of legal aliens – ‘on my passport it is written that I am from another planet’. In fact, his wordplay turns on translation; the Latvian term – applicable to many Latvian Russian-speakers – does not carry the sense of extra-terrestrial.

46 Developers were part of a sector vilified and held responsible for the recent economic crash (Kelly 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number G31088] to the Our Languages research project led by Dr. Sarah Smyth.