Russian as a school subject in Germany: between politics and the market
Since the 1990s the Russian language has had an increasing presence in the public space in Germany. As a result of migration in the past decades, it has become one of the most spoken migrant languages in Germany. Russian is used predominantly in families from post-Soviet countries with a Russianspeaking population. With regard to acquisition processes, language socialization and attitudes, migrants are not a homogeneous group: the majority are resettlers of German origin, then there are Jewish émigrés and Russian-speaking refugees of other ethnic origins. On the basis of recent statistical data, Anstatt (2011) states that these groups together make about 4.5 million. There are a lot of factors supporting the vitality of Russian under migration conditions. In multilingual cities like Berlin, as well as in some smaller localities, Russian speakers have developed a widespread infrastructure (shops, bilingual kindergartens and primary schools, medical care institutions, libraries, radio channels, regional newspapers, social media, etc.). Such developments seem to be part of a worldwide trend. Russian is gaining increasing visibility and this is not linked to tourism alone. Russian as a foreign language has been studied at schools and at the tertiary level for more than half a century, although teaching took different paths in West and East Germany. The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of the recent situation of Russian as a school subject in Germany, taking into consideration the factors that determine the status of Russian as a part of foreign language teaching system, the societal value of the Russian language as well as the ‘key actors’ involved. The history of Russian, more than other school subjects, clearly shows that in the times of societal transformations or even changes in the political systems, the educational system responds to this change. Undoubtedly, every citizen of EU must have an opportunity to learn English as the language of global communication. Therefore, it is offered as a first foreign language in all federal states of Germany, starting not later than in the third grade. This opens an opportunity to learn a second foreign language already at the lower secondary level and a third and fourth language later. While it is obligatory to learn a second language, the language can be chosen according to the school profile. Russian is primarily offered as a second, third or fourth language. A few schools with a bilingual profile offer Russian either as a first foreign language or as a language of instruction in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Depending on the grade at the entry level and the number of class hours, the proficiency level B1 or B2 is reached in secondary schools (Table 1).
The Russian language maintenance and language contacts
In our introductory article, we outline the main sociolinguistic features of Russian as a heritage language of post-Soviet immigrants in European settings and beyond. We offer a general overview of the evolution of Russian as a global language, with a particular focus on its geodemographics and economic and social value as a lingua franca . Based on this, we analyse the main principles defining the maintenance of Russian as a language of migration and as a heritage language in different countries, and emphasise the most important questions that still need to be addressed in this field of research. The main objective of this special issue is to combine the most recent research on the vitality of different languages of post-Soviet republics in new political milieu, with a particular focus on European and Asian countries, but there are other objectives as well. We propose to explore the factors that have either favoured or hindered the maintenance and transmission of languages of post-Soviet immigrants and repatriates, and how these sociolinguistic processes become evident in language vitality on both private and public levels. Our special issue primarily addresses the questions of family language policy, new language contacts and their management, and linguistic landscape in heritage speakers, diasporas and their new settings in Europe, Asia and the US.
Attrition in the Verb System of Italian in Australia.
This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria. Italian language samples are elicited through interviews with first and second generation Italo-Australians, and speakers are placed on an attritional continuum along which the verb forms are compared. The explanations for the patterns of loss identified in the data involve a combination of factors, such as markedness principles, universal or general characteristics of spoken language and interlinguistic influence of dialect.