A large number of disciplines within the broad area of linguistics construct their theories based on empirical data separated from the attitudes and judgments made by their informants about the language under study.18 Others, however,
make this evaluation their subject of enquiry and focus specifically on the way ordinary speakers perceive, treat and interpret the language in use. This is the key area of ‘folk linguistics’, whose concern is to grasp the way ‘naive’ theory of
language is formed and functions (Golovko 2014; Preston 1994). Speaking in a wider anthropological context, ‘folk linguistics’ deals with the ‘emic’ approach to language as opposed to the ‘etic’ (and thus fundamentally exterior) constructions of, for example, classical structural linguistics in the traditional Saussurian sense.19
The study of folk linguistics was first proposed shortly after the introduction of this methodological opposition, in 1966, when Henry Hoenigswald suggested that linguists should pay attention not only to ‘what goes on’ (in language) but also to ‘what people think of what goes on’ and ‘what people say goes on’ (cit. Niedzelski & Preston 2003: 2).
This new approach was at first focused on the exploration of folk taxonomy – the linguistic terminology and its interpretations shared by native speakers, naive dialectology and linguistic varieties in contact, and so forth. The consequent turn of the research towards the social and cultural context of folk definitions and attitudes occurred due to the emerging interest of linguistic anthropology in speakers’ language behaviour. As argued by D. Hymes, ‘[i]f the community’s own theory of linguistic repertoire and speech is considered […], matters become all the more complex and interesting’ (1972: 39). Folk linguistic analysis would also ‘include accounts of what people say of the reactions to language’ (Niedzelski &
18 This chapter has been reworked into an article and published in the special issue of Russian
Journal of Communication on new realities of ‘Global Russian’ (Kliuchnikova 2015).
19 The opposition of ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ approaches, first introduced by K. Pike (1967) in his reflections
on principles of categorization and structuring in phonetics, later made its way to the field of linguistic anthropology to initiate a corpus of studies in ‘ethnobotany’ and other fields exploring ‘native’ ways of categorization.
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Preston 2003: 29) and therefore deal with metalinguistic reflections, the choice of linguistic resources and common images of one’s native or other (contact or distant) languages, as well as shared stereotypical judgements about their users.
Within the area of applied linguistics, the systematisation and analysis of the views lay people may have about language-related topics is taken into consideration as well. The practical application of those ideas to everyday problems would include specific areas of language mastery, teaching and use, language policies and standardisation, language variations and contacts,
multilingualism and bilingual practices, language assessment and testing (Wilton et al. 2011). However coherent the idea of ‘folk linguistics’ might appear to have become recently, variation in the views of national academic schools on its methodological and analytical potential is striking. While English-speaking
linguists are preoccupied largely with investigating communities of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds in their language behaviour and attitudes towards the standard language and its non-standard variations (mostly through extensive participant observation and interviewing of the community’s members),20 other
traditions have predominantly focused on the image of standardised language as perceived by its users and thus explore implicit language attitudes and
metalinguistic reflections in media, public speech or naive linguistic enquiries.21
The idea of exploring language behaviour and attitudes as a crucial indicator in the times of major social transformations has caused a burst of research carried out within folk linguistics of the FSU countries on the speakers’ perceptions of changing statuses and domains of languages.22 However, there has
been relatively little attention paid to the attitudes of Russian-speaking migrant
20 Various examples of research of this kind were carried out during the late 1980s – early 1990s,
evoked by the interest in migrant vernaculars of host languages and their bilingual practices (e.g. Garcìa & Evangelista 1988).
21 The most vivid examples come from Russian-speaking folk linguistics with its attention to
archived materials, internet usages, and media texts as a main data source for exploring rather wide comprehensive subjects (e.g. Folk Linguistics 2012). In the sense of the closeness to other national schools of linguistic analysis, therefore, Russian-speaking folk linguists would tend to address non- Western languages, e.g. Japanese (Alpatov 2008).
22 One of the most detailed and extensive studies on post-Soviet attitudes towards Russian was
conducted by Vepreva (2005). Other recent examples of research on language attitudes and behaviour in the FSU countries include B. Korth’s (2005) studies of Kyrgyzstan and L. Bilaniuk’s (2003) paper on language status and attitudes in their relation to gender in contemporary Ukraine.
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communities outside the FSU area towards Russian. The major focus of interest here has tended to be code-switching patterns or language domains’ distribution, while there is little or no focus on the way Russian speakers conceptualise and explain their actual uses and declared attitudes. Several researchers have even argued in favour of defining ‘Russian of the abroad’ (iazyk russkogo zarubezhia),23
as a specific linguistic entity characteristic of (supposedly) all migrant communities using this language as their main means of communication in a modified form that evolved through constant linguistic contacts with their new host environments.24
The very idea of theoretical construction of the specific metalinguistic phenomenon of ‘the Russian language of the abroad’ provides a particular focus on the Russian language as highly standardised and thus subject to policies and planning carried out by Russian authorities. This term also refers to the rhetoric of constructed borders which entail a speech community of the language, the
accessibility of its standardised variant to speakers residing outside the Russian Federation, and the linguistic rights of these speakers. These implications, however macro-level they might seem, involve issues of language ideologies and attitudes which are expressed by different speech communities both within Russia itself and worldwide and are closely related to the ways Russian-speakers’ identities are shaped and reproduced in an everyday communicative context.
23 The concept of zarubezh’e lies at the intersection of the notions ‘abroad’, ‘foreign’ and ‘émigré’. In
this respect the idea of ‘Russian’, which originally refers to the language and thus makes the communities under study ‘Russian-speaking’ and coming from diverse areas of the former Russian Empire or the USSR, becomes tightly connected to the idea of state borders and the issue of current citizenship of Russian Federation. The adjective rossiiskii (relating to the state borders of the Russian Federation) is replaced here by the word russkii, which is understood by some researchers as synonymous with the Russian-speaking continuum (Elistratov 2002). This way of delegating all the legacies of previous migration waves to Russia was also further developed in a less academic but more ideological context of the Russian government’s resettlement programme
‘Sootechestvenniki’ (‘Compatriots’).
24 The most coherent and detailed analysis here is probably by Zemskaia (2001) – the scholar who
introduced the term iazyk russkogo zarubezh’ia (‘the language of Russia’s abroad’) into academic discourse. Other similar concepts had appeared already in the mid-1990s and had continued to be used subsequently, such as Granovskaia’s (1995) russkii iazyk v rasseianii (‘Russian language in dispersion’). A recent development of this term includes ‘the Russian language outside the nation’ (Ryazanova-Clarke 2014) and critically re-examines the relation between the language and state borders.
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3.2. The ‘folk linguistics’ of Russian-speaking migrants in the North East of