Introduction

Russian ranks eighth among the most commonly spoken non-English languages in the USA (Table 1.1). The 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the US Census Bureau lists 851,174 home speakers of Russian. A comparison of the 1990 and 2000 Census figures indicates that the number of Russian speakers increased by 191 percent (up from 1990's figure of 243,904), the greatest increase of all the languages included in the Census. This upward trend continued, albeit less dramatically, between 2000 and 2007, with an increase of 20 percent. Immigration increases are especially noticeable from 1988 to 1994, when more then 300,000 immigrants arrived from what is now the former Soviet Union. According to the data of the US Department of Justice, 80 percent of these immigrants were Jewish (Chiswick 1997: 233). These increases can be explained by the relaxation of emigration policies in the former Soviet Union while the USA continued granting refugee status to immigrants from former Communist countries.

History

The Russian language belongs to the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and is an East Slavic language, along with Belarusian and Ukrainian. The three East Slavic languages share a common linguistic history. Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It was the state language of the Russian Empire (1721–1917) and the Soviet Union (1924–91).