Kapitolina Fedorova (European University, Saint-Petersburg)
Linguistic strategies used by native speakers of a given language when communicating with non-native speakers usually are described as a part of foreigner talk register specific for this language, and this register can be studied not only as a linguistic system but as a part of human behaviour reflecting social norms, settings, and attitudes towards non-native speakers and social roles performed by them. What is more, actual communication and people’s ideas about this communication, their linguistic stereotypes can be very different. The lecture deals with Russian Foreigner talk. Three sets of data will be used for comparison: stereotypical representations obtained through interviews and questionnaires (1) and actual speech records made in two rather different social situations in St. Petersburg (2) and in the Russian-Chinese border area (3). In both real-life communication cases informal conversations between native and non-native speakers of Russian were recorded but social roles performed by Russian speakers and their foreign interlocutors were quite different. As a result, linguistic patterns as well as language attitudes differ considerably in these situations, and their relation to linguistic stereotypes obtained indirectly can be more or less close.