Baku Russian: Colonial heritage in a post-colonial era

International audienceAlmost quarter of a century after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the linguistic legacy of Russian remains an inseparable part of identity for largegroups of ethnically non-Russian population now living in the newly-independent states whose political ties with Moscow have since loosened considerably. In some of them, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russian has been able to hold on to its status as an official language. In others, such as Azerbaijan, it completely ceased to fulfill administrative functions, but continues to enjoy relative popularity in everyday life. Majority-Russian-speaking city well into the 1980s, the capital city of Baku is probably the only locale in Azerbaijan where the survival of Russian is ensured at least in the lifetime of today’s young generation. Owing to the city’s multicultural environment dating back to the 1880s oil boom which stimulated rapidgrowth and active immigration of non-Azeris in Baku, Russian soon surpassed its ethnic borders and came to be adopted as a first language by thousands of Azeris, Armenians and Jews growing up in the city in the post-World War II era. On the other hand, its special role as the first language of groups that did not identify as Russian and its insular position led to it acquiring a recognizable drawl and unique elements of vocabulary, clearly under the influence of Azeri and to a lesser extent Armenian and non-standard varieties of Russian. The break-up of the Soviet Union affected both the status and the spread of Russian in Azerbaijan. Hundreds of thousands of its speakers chose to emigrate for political and economic reasons, leaving behind a city where Russian speakers are now a minority; but one willing to preserve its language and pass it onto the generation which has not in fact grown up or even lived under the Soviet rule. Baku Russian, however, found itself more isolated and therefore more and more susceptible to lexical and syntactic influence from Azeri, leading to the creation of a very distinct dialect