Chinese-Russian Bilingualism: Sociolinguistic Aspects of Language Behavior of the Ethnic
Chinese in St. Petersburg.
The Author has made an attempt to widely investigate a certain Chinese ethnic community
in St. Petersburg city in terms of Chinese-Russian bilingualism, which defines the novelty of
a paper. The relevance of this research is required by a necessity to carry out impartial
investigations of the ethnic Chinese in St. Petersburg and their attitude toward the Russian
language as well as the communicative models and relations with Russian urban population.
As it follows from the socio-historical essay compiled in the first chapter of the paper the
residence of the Chinese community in Saint-Petersburg dates back to the 18th century. First
started as a Chinese-Russian cultural interaction while St. Petersburg was a capital city and
characterized as a long-term relationships and cooperation till the 1937 when all kind of
social and everyday relationship stopped for the first time and then a bit later it has been
dissolved for the second time, during the Cultural Revolution in China. As a result the
construction of the social relations between the Chinese community and the urban population
began in Post-Restructuring period (Russian: after Perestroika) lacking in internationalism
ideology, hence as a consequence a negative attitude of Russian urban population toward a
non-Russian minority appeared.
Further on in the next two chapters the explanation of the procedure and the results of the
sociolinguistic survey are given. The survey was made in terms of questionnaire and on the
base of sociolinguistics “matched-guise” method to estimate the attitude of the minority to
the Russian language. The spectrum of a social data covers a relatively imposing selection of
ethnic Chinese in St. Petersburg with a total number of 25 informants. The main purpose of
the interview was to qualify their communicative competence in terms of Russian language.
The estimation was made by the individual conclusion, i. e. informants were asked to range
their own communicative competence according to the different sociological criteria: age,
education, occupation etc. Thus the communicative competence of the younger generation is
the highest in this data while the level of the elder’s competence is the lowest, remains. One
of the peculiarities to be mentioned is that the distribution of the communicative competence
in Russian language within Chinese family is of such kind that allows the senior of the clan
run a business in St. Petersburg without knowing Russian language.