Field Study of Slavic Diasporas in South America: Transformations in the Language System (According to the Results of an Expedition Carried Out in Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay in 2025)

The paper discusses the first results of a linguistic expedition to Slavic communities made in the spring of 2025. The study seeks to to document the Slavic languages of migrants, establish the dialectal basis of the Slavic speech under study, and analyze the preservation and reflection in narratives of dialectal features typical for the region that the first Slavic migrants came from. The fieldwork was done using semi-structured interviews among Polish speakers in São Paulo, Bosnian speakers in Santos (Brazil), Croatian speakers in Santiago, Iquique, and Antofagasta (Chile), Russian, Belarusian, Polish, and Ukrainian speakers in Encarnación, Fram, and Coronel Bogado (Paraguay). All respondents are representatives of economic migration who settled in South America. The degree of influence of foreign language items, their level of adaptation, as well as cases of code-switching were analyzed using the comparative method based on oral interviews and the most representative statements that the respondents made in Slavic languages. The narratives discussed a variety of topics, including the language situation in the past and present, as well as cultural adaptation mechanisms within both spiritual and material aspects of culture. On the one hand, when Spanish and Portuguese words are adapted, phonetic features that are atypical for a specific Slavic language are eliminated. Morphological adaptation occurs by integrating into existing declension paradigms and by eliminating the unusual endings of words in the nominative case. On the other hand, there is interference from other languages. The linguistic competence of respondents varies; still, all of them use Spanish or Portuguese elements. The linguistic situation shows a similar trend everywhere: early on Slavic languages were used for communication within families, whereas today there has been a linguistic shift in favor of Spanish and Portuguese, which calls for preservation of the existing Slavic languages in the region.

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