Documentation of Slavic diasporas languages in South America: dialect and contact features

Since 2015, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been working systematically on the investigation of the languages of the Slavic diaspora living in compact communities in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile. The goal is to record samples of Slavic speech from the descendants of economic migrants who moved to South America before World War II, as well as to identify the dialects of the migrant Slavic languages and contact features that have arisen under the influence of the dominant Romance languages - Spanish and Portuguese. As a result of field research, linguistic data were collected, including audio and video recordings in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian. The research archive contains recordings from speakers of Slavic origin who speak Spanish and Portuguese, mostly from communities of the earliest waves of Slavic migration - the second half of the 19th century. The report will present the results of our work: I will characterize the most striking Slavic-Romanic interference phenomena in phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, syntaxe, I will analyze Slavic borrowings in the local versions of Spanish and Portuguese, and present the prospects for our project.