The development of linguistics, applied linguistics and the language teaching in the last fifty years has been dominated by the studies investigating the English language. This situation is beginning to change as “the success of modernism in integrating all the communities into the global whole has created greater visibility for the local” (Canagarajah 2005). The globalization of the use of English as the language of international communication encounters its opposite trend in the growing interest towards local languages “to resist the colonizing thrust of English” (Canagarajah 2006, 586). Linguistic research becomes increasingly more enriched by explorations of languages other than English coming into the forefront of academic discussions. As pointed out – quite paradoxically in a collection of papers on English-language teaching – “among the darkness of the ‘English only’ movement and the destruction resulting from the hegemony of English, there is a faint ray of hope” (Hall and Eggington 2000, xiii). Among these signs of hope in North America is the first national conference on heritage languages in America held in 1999 (Hall and Eggington 2000), and the establishment of the Heritage Language Journal in 2003.

Largely due to the growth of Russian-speaking communities around the world in the last few decades, Russian in particular is getting more involved in the advanced linguistic, neurolinguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research and related studies (e.g., Baerman 2011; Goddard 2011; Xiang et al. 2011).