Slavic Heritage Students

Dear Students,

A heritage student is one who comes from a family where a language other than English (or Spanish) was spoken. They come from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds — some left Russia with their parents at the age of three or four and hence have only fleeting memories of mother Russia, others remained in Russia until the age of reason and full linguistic development. Still others had Russian grandparents and never attained even a child's speaking competence, but wish to fulfill бабушка's dream that little Ванечка might speak and write the language of Pushkin. In 203 we have Лёша, who reads, writes and speaks, but needs work on the literary language as on vocabulary development and syntax. He really is perfect for our class and should learn a great deal,  while, with his experience with the language, he will help our non-heritage students learn. This is the ideal for us.

Since the collapse of the CCCP Russians have been coming to our universities as graduate students and professors, mostly from mathematics and the sciences. Our adjunct professor Sasha Raskina is the spouse of a brilliant mathematician. She was educated in Moscow in post-Stalinist Soviet times and has a unique perspective of the past that our heritage students, unfortunately, lack. Another of our teachers, Lidia Zhigunova, comes to us from Нальчик in the Caucasus; her spouse is a brilliant physicist at Tulane. And there are many others. This means that the opportunity to learn and study Russian has widened enormously since 1991. One of our students, Berenice, has worked as a counselor in Perm' — по–русски Пермь, в Перми (a third-declension feminine with stress on the locative). She has had a summer experience which is routine in non-Slavic language groups, but until recent times has been unheard of in Russia. Kudos! 

For me as a Slavic linguist (dear Dean Haber: you can say: "So that's what he is!") the heritage student is a phenomenon of twelve different languages and their interweavings. The tissue of generational linguistic ties is a crazy quilt. I've had lots of students take Czech with me, for example, who had Slovak grandparents, or even parents; Slovak is a different language, but it is close enough to Czech that the old folks urge their grandchildren to study it. These are really minority languages, but all the rarer and more beautiful for their absence from American university curricula. I've had lots of students of Ukrainian background, including a superb French and Russian major who is now a graduate student of Ukrainian studies at Harvard. What a piece of good fortune for her, and for me to have had the privilege of teaching her. I love to read Belorusian, though I don't speak it, and to study its relationship with Russian; to Russians it may seem like a 'dialect', which is a prejudice of hegemony. Tulane German professor Brancaforte has a good friend who is from Belarus'; he has studied Russian because it is the scientific language of that country, even though Belarusian is spoken at his friend's home as well as Russian.

More perhaps on this topic later. Coming soon: Quentin Tarantino's new movie and Americans Abroad.