Challenges in Heritage Language Documentations: BraPoRus, Spoken Corpus of Heritage Russian in Brazil

Abstract

The Bolshevik revolution in 1917, followed by the Civil War, induced a big wave of emigration from the ex-Russian Empire. These emigrants created their “Russia Abroad”. Many Russians stayed in Europe or China, but, in the 1940s and 1950s, many of them went to the USA, Latin America and other destinations. The importance of preserving the memories and documents of the old waves of the Russian emigration is crucial. Our group is collecting a corpus of heritage Russian in Brazil, the BRAzilian POrtuguese RUSsian Corpus (BraPoRus). While the history of Russian immigration in Brazil is to some extent studied, their remarkably preserved Russian has not been described. Our current aim is to describe the BraPoRus, a corpus that consists of multiple speech samples of older Russian heritage speakers in Brazil, and to discuss the best ways to make these data available in the forms that satisfy the requirements both for the linguistic and sociological research.