The Linguistic Landscape in the Russian Colony of San Javier (Uruguay)

The paper discusses the linguistic landscape of the city of San Javier, Uruguay for the first time. San Javier is a Russian colony founded by immigrants from the South Russian dialect zone, and the inscriptions found in public spaces of the city are analyzed. These inscriptions are collected during fieldwork researches carried out from 2015 to 2023. In San Javier, there are inscriptions written in Russian in both Cyrillic script and Spanish Latin script. The analysis reveals that these inscriptions reflect both phonetic and grammatical features of the South Russian dialect (e. g. akanye, the [γ] > [h] change at the end of the word, the pronunciation of the bilabial consonant). The contact phenomena, e. g. the exchange of letters between Cyrillic and Latin scripts, and betacism (when sounds [b] and [v] are confused), are also present in the inscriptions. This dialect has been evolving for over a century in close contact with Spanish, which explains the presence of these contact phenomena. The inscriptions sometimes use transliteration of Russian words. Among the anthroponymic names found in private sector, there are numerous diminutive names. Recently, bilingual signs have begun to appear on official signs and administrative buildings. This is due to several reasons, such as preserving the linguistic identity of city residents who no longer speak Russian and promoting San Javier as a tourist destination.

Russian language, linguistic landscape, Spanish language, San Javier, identity, immigrants, inscriptions