This article adds to the study of speech act pragmatics, language contact, heritage languages and bilingualism, by bringing attention to the pragmatics of a contact language, heritage Russian (HR). The paper has a descriptive orientation, its main goal being to produce a baseline for the pragmatic competence of speakers with partial L1 acquisition, which marks language contact in immigrant populations. It centers on communicative strategies and the choice of linguistic forms in requests made by HR speakers, native speakers of full Russian, and native speakers of American English. The specific research questions examined in this inquiry are: Is the linguistic variable –the form of polite requests– correlated with the population (speakers of HR vs. full Russian speakers)? How do the differences play out? Do HR speakers have their own communicative norms? If yes, did these new norms evolve under the impact of English or as a result of language-internal restructuring? It is reported that HR shows evidence of evolving its own conventions for expressing polite requests which differ from the corresponding conventions in full Russian. Specifically, HR speakers employ notably more impersonal modals than monolingual native speakers of Russian in informal scenarios and rely on enhanced syntactic complexity to mark polite requests in formal scenarios. In indirect requests generated in both types of scenarios, HR speakers overuse the downgrader požalujsta ‘please’ and underuse the negative particle ne. These emergent communicative norms in HR seem to be partially affected by English, but may also involve language-internal change.