Old Believers in Brazil: Preserving Linguistic Identity

Abstract

This article presents a study of the history of Russian Old Believers’ emigration to Brazil. As such, it analyses the reasons that allowed them to maintain their linguistic identity, and identifies the features of the dialect of the Russian language of the Old Believers living in Latin America and in Brazil in particular. Old Believers moved to Brazil after centuries of oppression, first leaving Central Russia for the East of the country, Siberia and Primorye, and then, after the 1917 Revolution, many of them moved to Harbin (China). After the 1949 Revolution in China, they turned to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who sent them to the United States, Canada, Australia and Brazil. Brazil was the first country to grant them visas. The main wave of migration of Old Believers to Brazil took place in 1957–1958, that is, after the policy of nationalization of the New State carried out in 1937–1945 by President Getúlio Vargas, whose goal was to turn all immigrants into Brazilian citizens by banning their native language in both official and everyday communication. Thus, the Old Believers managed to fully preserve their religious, cultural and linguistic identity due to the hermetic nature of their communities and the preservation of their traditional way of life. The dialect of the Old Believers of Brazil retains the typical features of the Nizhny Novgorod dialect of the nineteenth century, in which archaic linguistic features and semantic shifts in the meaning of words were preserved. However, it also contains lexical innovations denoting new concepts of modern life, Spanish and Portuguese borrowings and their adaptation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, several Old Believer families decided to return to Russia under the State Programme to Assist the Voluntary Resettlement to Russia of Compatriots Living Abroad. Specifically, they returned to Primorye, thus completing their round-the-world trip.