From ‘Muteness’ to Eloquence: Immigrants’ Narratives about Languages  

Oleh:

Yelenevskaya, Maria N. ; Fialkova, Larisa

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Awareness (Full Text) vol. 12 no. 1 (Jan. 2003), page 30-48.
Fulltext: 12.1.30-48.pdf (243.37KB)

Isi artikel

Immigration mobilises laypeople’s awarenessof language.When immigrants begin to learna newlanguage, comparisons betweenthe mother tongue and a newlanguage are inevitable. If learning occurs simultaneously with entering a new language community, speakers become more sensitive to the cultural and social implications that multilingualism involves. This study is devoted to personal narratives of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union. It is based on 115 in-depth interviews with 135 immigrants, which make up approximately 75 hours of recording, transcribed in full. The interviewswere conducted in Russian, the mother tongue of both the interviewees and the interviewers.Immigrants’ interviewsrevealawarenessthat language is a status category. Imperial attitude towards minority languages in the USSR has been transferredto the linguistic situation in Israel.As in the SovietUnion, Russian is associated with superior culture. Hebrew, on the other hand, is perceived as an instrument of upward mobility. In the situation of emerging bilingualism, immigrants separate domains inwhich they use different languages and assign different symbolic value to them. All the informants perceiveRussianas the language inwhich they canrealisefull potential of their personality, express emotions and feel at ease.

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