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Abstract:

The article is devoted to the languages of communication of migrants from Central Asia in Russian migrant social networks. It also aims at finding out whether the migrants’ online communication reproduces oral offline communication in ethnic languages, negatively perceived by part of the population in Russian cities. Having analyzed the language of five open groups of Uzbek and Kyrgyz migrants in the social network VKontakte and in the Telegram chat “Zherdesh Moskva”, the author concludes that VKontakte functions primarily as an advertising and business platform where the Russian language prevails, along with which Uzbek and Kyrgyz languages and mixed language variants are used. Unlike open social networks, the function of intra-group, intra-ethnic online communication is performed by less public messengers and is carried out mainly in an ethnic language. Thus, migrant social networks are not an analogue of offline communication, and the massive presence of Russian in them is supported by historical, economic, and other factors. At the end, the author justifies the need for a more detailed study of the relationship between urban multilingualism, migration and computer-mediated communication.

Keywords: migration, Central Asia, Russian urban multilingualism, social networks, online and offline communication.