Overview

Chinese immigrants who settle in Russia’s Far East without formal instruction in the Russian language communicate with local Russians using Russian vocabulary. Each immigrant forms their language to communicate with Russians, not with family or other immigrants. The ‘single-generation languages’ that immigrants form are not replications or simplifications of Chinese or Russian. Grammatical systems formed by these speakers challenge some fundamental assumptions in early 21st-century linguistic theories. Grammatical systems of single-generation languages provide a unique window into how complex grammatical systems emerge, what are the first formal means of expression, and what are the first meanings expressed in grammatical systems. Given massive migrations in the contemporary world, single-generation languages are common, yet understudied, products of language contact.

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Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Ph.D. (1968), University of Warsaw, is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He has published many books on African languages and syntax and semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective. Most recently he published, with Marielle Butters, The emergence of grammatical functions (2020, Oxford University Press). Natalia Gurian, Ph.D. (2009), Lomonosov Moscow State University, Institute of Asian and African Studies, is Associate Professor at the Department of Education in Oriental Languages and Oriental Studies, School of Education, Far Eastern Federal University (Russia). Sergei Karpenko, Ph.D. (2007), Barnaul State Pedagogical University, is Associate Professor at Department of Romance and German Languages, Far Eastern Federal University (Russia). Recent publication by the authors together: Frajzyngier, Zygmunt; Natalia Gurian; and Sergei Karpenko (2020). Language contact: Sino-Russian in Handbook of language contact, 2nd ed. R. Hickey (ed.). Wiley Online Library, pp. 689-715.

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