Russian Foreigners' Speech Imitation

Besides specific communication strategies used when speaking with foreigners, which, according to the literature, are characterized by strong simplification and adaptation in all linguistic domains, native speakers of any language might have a certain intuition about how their language is spoken by non-natives. Although this intuition is not necessarily based on real facts, it still should contain some very typical and easily recognizable features, signaling that one is communicating with a foreigner. In order to establish a stereotype construct of Russian as a representation of foreigners’ speech, we analyzed Russian movies, where Russian actors played “foreign” characters, and conducted an experimental study where participants were asked to imitate the manner in which they thought foreigners would speak Russian. Focusing in our analysis on phonology and morphology, we stated that the imitation of foreigners’ speech, as it is presented in our data, is a bizarre combination of rudimentary mistakes and correct complex phenomena. Although some correspondences were observed, the stereotype construct of Russian Foreigners’ Speech Imitation, as we call it, differs from the construct of Russian as a foreign language as well as a reduced language that is observed in Russian pidgins.