Old Believers in Brazil: preserving linguistic identity

Abstract

This article is devoted to studying the history of Russian Old Believers’ emigration to Brazil, to analyzing the reasons that allowed them to maintain their linguistic identity, and to identifying the features of the dialect of the Russian language of the Old Believers living in Latin America and in Brazil, in particular. Old Believers moved to Brazil after centuries of oppression, as a result of which they first left Central Russia for the East of the country, Siberia and Primorye, and after the 1917 Revolution, many of them moved to Harbin (China). After the 1949 Revolution in China, they turned to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who sent them to the United States, Canada, Australia and Brazil. Brazil was the first country to grant them visas. The main wave of Old Believers’ migration to Brazil falls on 1957–58, that is why they managed to avoid the policy of nationalization of the New State, carried out in 1937–1945 by Getúlio Vargas, whose goal was to turn all immigrants into Brazilian citizens by banning their native language not only in official but also in everyday communication. Thus, the Old Believers managed to fully preserve their religious, cultural and linguistic identity due to a certain hermeticism of their communities and the preservation of their traditional way of life. The dialect of the Old Believers of Brazil retains the typical features of the Nizhny Novgorod dialect of the 19th century, in which archaic linguistic features and semantic shifts in the meaning of words were conserved. However, it also contains lexical innovations denoting new concepts of modern life, Spanish and Portuguese borrowings and their adaptation. At the beginning of the 21st century, within the framework of the State Program to Assist the Voluntary Resettlement to Russia of Compatriots Living Abroad, several Old Believer families decided to return to Russia, to Primorye, thus completing their round-the-world trip.