INTRODUCTION

When we talk about Russian immigrants in Uruguay, the city of San Javier, which was founded as a Russian colony in 1913, is the first thing mentioned. Immigrants from the southern provinces of the Russian Empire, followers of the religious movement New Israel, created under the leadership of Vasily Lubkov, settled there. After unsuccessful attempts to establish colonies in Russia, a decision was made to migrate to Uruguay, where between 1,500 and 2,000 migrants arrived in 1913–14 (Antonova 2010: 136; Petrov 2019a: 378).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, about half of the population of San Javier were descendants of Russian settlers (Petrov 2010: 76). The language situation in the Rio Negro department is unique because another group of Russians live in the vicinity of San Javier; these are the Old Believers who moved there in the mid-1950s from neighbouring Brazil. Russian communities in Uruguay, in addition to San Javier, can be also found in Young, Fray Bentos, Salta, Paysandú, Salto and Montevideo. The latter communities emerged as a result of both a secondary migration from San Javier and a primary migration of Eastern Slavs (Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians).

Recently, many scholars have published research on the language and culture of the Old Believers of Uruguay and neighbouring countries, specifically their identity and isolation; this has contributed to the preservation of their traditions (see Boiko de Semka 2009; Rovnova 2010, 2011, 2014a and 2014b). However, there are no studies on the language of the descendants of Russian immigrants in San Javier. An exception here are papers about the religious movement New Israel as well as the history of San Javier itself (Dubovik 2009; Martínez 2013; Moseikina 2003; Petrov 2010, 2019a and 2019b; Putiatova 2008; Roslik 2009). Studies of the San Javier Russian community present only fragmentary information about the language competences of the descendants of Russian immigrants. There is evidence that Russian is not spoken by the majority of the first immigrants’ descendants, and their language loss is associated with the lack of Russian language teaching at school (Roslik 2009: 66). The speakers’ language competences are characterised as ‘rudimentary’ (Petrov 2010: 66), as only a few are able to speak Russian (ibid.: 77); most of them are over sixty (ibid.: 78). In the scholarly literature we can also find information about the dynamics of language competences.