The language of the eastern branch of Russian emigration in the mirror of lexicographical studies

Russian Far Eastern immigration is a phenomenon of Russian history and culture. One of the means to preserve historical and cultural memory of the people is dictionary. It is considered important to compile a dictionary of the vocabulary used by the Russian immigrants abroad, in the Far East. The Russian Far Eastern immigration world is, first of all, the world of the Chinese city of Harbin, which became the center of the Russian immigration in the Far East in the 20th century. Pure, perfectly correct, and beautiful Russian speech was preserved there till the end of the 21st century by the elderly representatives of the Russian community, which used to be large in the beginning of the immigration process. In spite of the fact that the members of the Russian Harbin community lived in a constant surrounding of the Chinese and their language dominated in the city area the speech of the Russian immigrants was almost devoid of foreign language influence. The analysis of the written and oral texts produced by the Russian people in Harbin exposed informative repetition of words and phraseology units, which are considered valuable traits of the Russian Harbin language of the 20th century lacking a similar status or estimation on the level of the national Russian language. This layer of lexis and phraseology must be considered part and parcel of the national Russian language. The Dictionary of the Russian Harbin Language is to include the cultural information element. Its vocabulary is of utmost historical and cultural value because the words which will be included in the dictionary reflect the real facts of Russian life in the East. Harbin vocabulary means words and word combinations which were used in the speech of the Russian immigrants in the Far East and in this respect differed from the speech of the main Russian cities. Those are words with new semantics, words created by the immigrants according to the rules of the Russian word formation to denote new phenomena, borrowings from the Chinese language or the Russian-Chinese pidgin, city, town, and village names, Russian names of magazines, offices, departments, different place names formed by analogy with the Russian models.

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