Vol 20, No 3 (2023)

This article proposes to look at the theory of translanguaging from the angle of its universality/non-universality, bringing into discussion a new empirical case - speech strategies and practices of highly educated multilingual migrants from the former USSR and multilingual residents of modern Russia. The authors conclude that people whose socialization took place in this region are characterized by rigid ideas about the language norm and authenticity, about the “purity” of languages and high standards of speaking them. These concepts apply to all languages, both native and foreign. Traditional and conservative language ideologies are widespread in the Soviet and post-Soviet area, which is the reason why translanguaging is often perceived as careless speech, incomplete language competence. In this sense, this regional case demonstrates the non-universality of translanguaging theory and the importance of contexts in which attitudes towards multilingualism, linguistic norm and related linguistic phenomena are formed. It is primarily the western democratic, postcolonial context of translanguaging practice and theory that explains why the language attitudes and speech behavior of residents of (post)Soviet region do not fit into it.

The disappearance of small languages occurs through an obligatory phase of collective natural bilingualism (i.e., bilingualism resulting from language contacts) and ends with the transition of the language community to a more widespread and promising language. The disappearance of languages is the most large-scale manifestation and realization of the desire of the language system for monolingualism; with individual natural bilingualism, this desire manifests itself as linguistic attrition. Mathematical modeling of the phenomenon confirmed the hypothesis about the instability of natural bilingualism: both the individual one, and the collective natural bilingualism providing «double» communication, are at the same time a phase of transition to monolingualism. Language keepers are monolinguals, therefore the main condition for the preservation of an ethnic language is the existence of a monolingual repository (e.g., a country where the majority of the population has one mother tongue). At the same time, monolinguals can have as many foreign languages mastered in a logical way. Optimal for the preservation of any ethnic language (not just a small one) is the monolingualism of preschoolers (indigenous language) and the introduction of the second, third, etc. languages at the school age in a logical way. Keywords: disappearance of languages, collective natural bilingualism, artificial bilingualism, language attritions, non-linear dynamics, mathematical modeling, unstable state, monolingual repository.

This article is devoted to the study of Erzya-Russian bilingualism in the aspect of code switching on the territory of the Republic of Mordovia. The aim of the study is to present the types of intra-phrase code switching based on the material of narrative recordings of Erzya-Russian bilingual children. Special attention is paid to the study of the peculiarities of the functioning of native and non-native languages in a bilingual society, the mechanisms of code switching in children, taking into account the (non-) correspondence of structures in two languages and different strategies of native speakers’ response when using two languages in one unit of discourse. The source base of this study was the materials of the spontaneous narrative collected by the author of the article in 2017-2019. The informants are bilingual children aged 4 to 7 years inclusive. The research methods were the descriptive method of factual material, narrative sampling, included and not included observation.

The contact of languages and cultures forms bilingualism and biculturalism at different levels of their functioning. The purpose of the article is to analyze and describe the dual simultaneous formation and functioning of bilingual and bicultural communication based on the material of contact between the Kazakh and Russian languages. Language is the basis of bilingualism and biculturalism, since both bilingual and intercultural processes in an individual and society are carried out through the use of language units. Psycho-images of linguistic units and cultural symbols are formed in the consciousness of an individual of society, which are the basis of monolingual and monocultural communication within an ethnos. These national-linguistic-cultural psycho-images contribute to the formation of foreign, foreign-cultural psycho-images in the minds of the future bilingual, bicultural individual and society. The materials of the study were Kazakh (In general, Turkic), Russian linguistic and speech units, universal and national-specific cultural concepts and symbols, which, on the one hand, give rise to interference, on the other hand, facilitation, the latter facilitates the assimilation of non-native languages and cultures. Therefore, teaching a second language will be more effective if it is carried out when teaching and language material is presented in a harmonious combination of the language, which, in content, are logically closely interconnected with the cultural values of the foreign people. In the course of the study, methods of comparative analysis, opposition of minimal pairs, methods and techniques of inductive and deductive nature were used. The results of the scientific research are of theoretical and practical importance in the aspect of the formation of bilingualism of knowledge, skills and abilities of intercultural communication in the conditions of active Turkic-foreign (Kazakh-Russian) bilingualism and biculturalism.

The article analyzes the modern processes of artistic aestheticization and transculturation of the Tuvan text in the works of two modern authors: Maadyr-ool Khovalyg, who writes about Tuva in Tuvan, and Roman Senchin, who represents Tuva as genius loci in Russian. The authors of the article postulate the thesis about the fixation of the micromodels of the native world in the works of the Tuvan author by means of the mother tongue, which is a foreign-cultural text for the Russian reader. In the Russian prose written by Senchin, the principle of transculturation consists in the transfer through the native language of the “other” ethno-cultural consciousness of the author, when through various principles of modeling “his own world” and “another world”, not an orientalist, but a transcultural image of Tuva is formed in the world models “paradise lost”, “fairy-tale world”, “exotic world”. The authors of the article seek to identify the specifics of the artistic design of the Tuvan text in the system of an interdisciplinary paradigm of aesthetic, historiosophical, ethnographic, mythological correlates in the works of ethnically different writers. The relevance of the research is due to the fact that the transcultural approach (conceptual for the presented article) in the study of any national literature in the paradigm system “Russian literature and the literature of the peoples of Russia”. This approach makes it possible to remove most of the contradictions in the ethnic identification of the literary ethos, the writer and the individual work itself. The understanding of ethnocultural and transcultural literature as historical and cultural phenomena makes it possible to find their manifestations in completely multidirectional author’s artistic models of the Tuvan text.

The article is devoted to the analysis of a translingual literary text, which is a methodologically complex object of study due to its belonging to two (or more) linguocultural fields. The theory of translinguism is an actual course of interdisciplinary research, the problems of which affect the features of the creation and functioning of a text created by the author in a language that is not ethnically primary for him. A brief review of theoretical works devoted to the scientific concept of “translingualism” is given. On the material of individual poems by B. Kairbekov from the poetic collection “Towards the Sun”, individual elements of translingual poetics are identified and characterized.

The interpretation of biblical concepts is a complex translation problem, the method of literal translation cannot solve it. The search for lexical matches in the target language is not always systematic. A comprehensive solution to this problem is possible within the framework of the conceptual theory of metaphor, which allows you to rethink the process of translating biblical concepts. The article explores the implementation of the concept «the Lamb of God» («ὁ ἀµνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ») in the translations of the Gospel of John into English, German and Russian in the light of modern research on the conceptual theory of metaphor. The purpose of the study is to analyze the degree of implementation of the concept «the Lamb of God» («ὁ ἀµνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ») in translations of the Gospel of John. The work uses the MIPVU method to identify metaphors in the original text of the Gospel of John, as well as methods of analysis and synthesis to assess the adequacy of the translation of the concept « the Lamb of God» in the context of the biblical conceptual field. As a result of the study, it was revealed that in the English, German and Russian translations of the Gospel of John, the concept of the «the Lamb of God» («ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ») of the original text is not fully implemented. The absence of a separate lexical unit leads to confusion in the translations of the «Lamb» («ἀμνὸς») from the Gospel of John and the «Lamb» («ἀρνίον») from the Apocalypse, which distorts the meaning of the translations. The application of the MIPVU method to identify metaphors in the biblical text, as well as an integrated approach to the translation of biblical concepts, is a developing direction in modern translation studies. Modern advances in the field of metaphor theory make it possible to create new translations of the Bible that are accessible to readers who are not familiar with the biblical conceptual field.