Accents of Russian in Performative Use: Ethnic Styles, Language Attitudes, and Identities of Young Non-native Speakers

Abstract

The paper deals with the performative use of different ethnic accents by young multilingual speakers of Russian. It aims at revealing the ways ethnic accents are used to challenge existing monolingual bias and reclaim agency opposing ethnic and linguistic prejudices. The study is based on an analysis of videos representing and discussing different nonnative accents of Russian, created both by professional comedians and by amateurs and published on YouTube and TikTok. Metadata and comments on the videos expressing attitudes towards the performance of accents and linguistic stereotypes were also included in the analysis to reveal typical audience reactions.

Keywords: youth multilingualism, language ideology, ethnic identity,
Russian, migration, comedy, vlogs