(Heritage) Russian Case Marking: Variation and Paths of Change

Abstract

Russian’s six cases and multiple noun classes make case marking potentially challenging ground for heritage speakers. Indeed, morphological levelling, “probably the best-described feature of language loss”, has been substantiated. One study from 2006 showed that Heritage Russian speakers in the USA produced canonical or prescribed markers for only 13% of preposition+nominal sequences. Conversely, another study from 2020 found that Heritage Russian speakers in Toronto produce a 94% canonical case marker rate in conversational speech. To explore the effects of methodological differences across several studies, the current paper circumscribes the context to preposition+nominal sequences in Heritage Russian speech from the same Toronto corpus as used by the 2020 study but mirroring the domain investigated by Polinsky and including a Homeland comparison to consider changes in both the rates of use of canonical case marking and distributional patterns of non-canonical use. Regression models show more canonical case marking in more frequent words, an independent effect of slightly more mismatch by later generations, but less morphological levelling than reported by Polinsky. Lexicon size does not predict case marking rates as strongly as language usage patterns do, but generation, since immigration, is the best-fitting social predictor. We confirm (small) rate changes in Heritage (vs. Homeland) Russian canonical case marking but not in patterns of levelling.