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This paper focuses on the language practices of 1.5 generation speakers of Russian in Israel, i.e. “those individuals who came to the host country at a young age” (Isurin and Riehl 2017). Based on interview data which I collected between 2018 and 2021, I argue that the characteristics of their Russian use allows to identify a diaspora variety of Russian spoken in Israel which shares commonalities with such varieties of Russian as prostorechie (Sidorova 1990) and surzhyk and which, at the same time, can be argued to have an influence on morphosyntactic developments in Modern Hebrew (Kagan 2016, Taube 2016).
About 20% (CBS 2013) of Israel’s population is Russian-speaking, including both first generation immigrants and heritage speakers from generation 1.5 and onward. While still understudied, the language practices of the 1.5 generation Russian speakers in Israel are highly insightful for research on contact dynamics between diaspora language varieties and the language(s) of both the “sending” and the “receiving” society.
Diaspora languages are described as having “a clear, socially determined directionality” (Friedman 2022) with reference to contact directions, context of use and prestige. However, based on data which I collected between 2018 and 2021 in sociolinguistic interviews with 1.5 generation Russian speakers in Israel, I argue that their language practices are largely multidirectional. On the one hand, they feature lexical code-mixing and morphological adaptation from Hebrew into Russian (Perelmutter 2018) as well as prosodical patterns typical of Hebrew; on the other hand, due to the visibility and presence of Russian in the linguistic landscape and soundscape of Israel, Russian makes its way into the everyday usage of Hebrew amongst native Israelis without Russian competences, and morphosyntactic change in the sphere of possessive and nominal predicative sentences in Modern Hebrew is likely influenced by Russian as a contact diaspora variety, too (Kagan 2016, Taube 2016). Moreover, convergences can be observed between features of the Russian spoken in Israel and so-called Colloquial Russian (Kaltseis and Stadler 2023), a variety of mainland Russian differing from so-called Codified Standard Russian (Kaltseis and Stadler 2023) in many respects, including morphosyntax, lexicon, phonetics, prosody and sociopragmatics.
This paper relies on a data corpus of 41 interviews carried out in Russian and Hebrew with young adult mostly 1.5 generation Russian speakers living in Israel. Data analysis allows to circumscribe a diaspora variety of Russian which, while it has been labeled “Israeli Russian” (Perelmutter 2018), has still not been described in due detail on the lexical, morphosyntactic and suprasegmental level, nor has it been put in relation to its contact varieties (i.e. Modern Hebrew, Colloquial Russian and Codified Standard Russian) to the due degree. This paper aims to fill out this void thereby also contributing to discussions in variational sociolinguistics about 1) a definition of diaspora varieties and 2) contact dynamics between diaspora varieties and the languages of the sending and the receiving society.