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Part of
Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity
Edited by Hagen Peukert and Ingrid Gogolin
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 6] 2017
► pp. 99–121

Biscriptality and heritage language maintenance

Russian in Germany

| University of Greifswald
| University of Hamburg

The paper deals with the script choices made by bilingual Russian-German children when they are asked to compose texts in their Russian heritage language. Furthermore, the relationship between script choice and overall proficiency in the heritage language is investigated. We compare two different age groups of bilingual children. The analysis reveals that knowledge of the Cyrillic script is not dependent on their age upon arrival in Germany. Even those who use the Cyrillic script for writing in Russian sometimes use Latin graphemes. The appearance of Latin graphemes can be treated as an unconscious negative transfer from German, but also sometimes as a purposeful transfer to substitute for complex Cyrillic graphemes. Most of the factors used for assessing language proficiency (e.g. morphological correctness, mean length of sentences, etc.) are related to script choice, but significant effects were found only for task accomplishment.

Keywords: heritage linguistics, language maintenance, biscriptality, biliteracy, Russian-German bilingualism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Biscriptality and its relation to the acquisition of (bi)literacy
    • 2.1Overview of previous research
    • 2.2 Research questions for the current study
  • 3.Study design
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data sampling method
  • 4.Results I: Script choice and orthography
    • 4.1Quantitative distribution of scripts in the corpus
    • 4.2Age upon arrival and script choice
    • 4.3Latin characters used to render Russian sounds in the corpus
    • 4.4Cyrillic-internal character variation in the corpus
  • 5.Discussion of results regarding script choice and orthography
  • 6.Results II: Correlation of script choice and overall proficiency in the heritage language
    • 6.1Script choice and task accomplishment
    • 6.2Script choice and syntactic performance in the texts
    • 6.3Script choice and morphological correctness scores
    • 6.4Script choice and lexical diversity
  • 7.Discussion of results regarding script choice and proficiency in the heritage language
  • 8.Conclusions
  • 9.Outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.6.06bre
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[no author supplied]
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