The reconstruction of the metalanguage biography of a subethnos as an aspect of the study of evolutionary processes in ethnocontact zones: German dialects of the Russian Germans

The research focuses on the linguistic biography of the Russian Germans – a subethnos living in the contact zone of German and Russian cultures. By now, Russian Germans are engulfed in rapid assimilation, with traditional linguistic and cultural dominants being displaced under the influence of the Russian-speaking environment. “Language biography” in a broad sense is understood as the history of interaction with language and its varieties experienced by a person, individual facts of which a person cognitively reconstructs and explicates in speech. The reconstruction of the linguistic biography of the Russian Germans is carried out by analyzing German dialect statements of a narrative and autobiographical nature, which, along with biographical information, explicate the knowledge of ethnic Germans about the history of their own subethnos and ideas about the languages they speak or which they have been in contact during their lives with during their lives. The empirical research material was collected through field practices in Western Siberia – in the region that currently demonstrates the highest number of Russian Germans. The study found that one of the stages of the linguistic biography of the Russian Germans “The War and the post-war years”, covering the period from 1941 to 1955, includes its own specific set of phenomena caused by the autobiographical and historical context. This set is formed by the historical and biographical events, as well as by the components of the linguistic situation and certain linguistic realities relevant for perception. There is also a change in the axiological interpretation of the same linguistic phenomena identified at different stages of linguistic biography.