Sociocultural Perspectives on Language Change in Diaspora (review)

The book under review is a recent addition to the growing body of literature exploring the issues of language maintenance and group identity among American immigrants. The specific focus of this particular exploration is that wave of Russian immigrants who entered the United States during the 1970s, directly after many of the previous travel restrictions were lifted. As the author reminds us, a large percentage of this third wave of immigrants were Jewish. Thus, in addition to the usual challenges concerning the cultural assimilation, this minority faced the triple challenge of adjusting to a majority which had a radically different religion, political ideology, and language.

To highlight the special issues facing this group of immigrants, supplementary information is also given on two earlier waves of Russian immigrants. The first wave consists of those Russians who entered the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, during the Bolshevik Revolution. The second wave is identified as occurring some 30 years later, when Russian immigrants entered the US during World War II.

Andrews begins his examination with an interesting presentation of the work which has been done by both American and Soviet sociolinguists on prolonged language contact between Russians and Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. He then proceeds to contextualize this research against the ambivalent to hostile political relationship between the two nations. Even after many of the Cold War hostilities had begun to ease, the pressures placed upon the third wave of Soviet immigrants remained considerable. For most, linguistic assimilation was not only the key to social integration, but also essential for economic survival.

In the first section of his research, A presents his findings on the lexical innovations manifested in the speech of third wavers. Special attention is paid to the phenomenon of lexical borrowings and neologisms. Not surprisingly perhaps, the innovations identified tended to group around several semantic domains: housing, employment, transportation, education, and cuisine. The second part of the presentation explores the influence of American English upon the development of the phonological system of the Russian speech community.

Much of the information presented in this part of the study is taken from the researcher’s work with twelve young adult informants: Two were born in America to Russian-speaking families, and ten were born in the Soviet Union but later immigrated to the United States. The bilingual competence for each of the respondents was judged to be superior although no formal objective testing was performed. Despite the relatively small sample, many interesting findings were made regarding the patterns of intonation, word-stress, and rhythm as well as the pronunciation of the individual consonants and vowels. However, given the limited number of respondents studied, few generalizations can be made to the larger population of the Russian-American speech community. Nevertheless, this work still constitutes a fascinating addition to the body of research currently available on the linguistic processes of identity formation and transformation among ethnic immigrants in the United States.