About the Word Arbuse as one of the First Russicisms in the Language of Russian Germans

The article presents the process of creation of German island dialects in Russia and in the USSR. Starting in the second half of the 18th century, people from various German regions, primarily farmers and artisans, migrated to Russia. The authorities most frequently settled them in so-called colonies, or in other words, compact country villages, which were typically separated widely from each other. Germans settled in very large numbers along the Volga, in southern Russia, Crimea, the Caucasus, as well as in the St. Petersburg region, Novgorod, Voronezh and Volyn.

The arrivals from Germany brought with them a wide range of dialects and local varieties. Arriving in the colonies, they most commonly settled down based on their places of origin in Germany, but sometimes by religious denomination or even on the basis of friendships formed on the way to Russia. In this way, the residents of one colony might speak even dozens of substantially different dialects and local varieties. These native varieties of speech mixed together and created a common code, which nevertheless retained archaisms as a result of the lack of contact with the living German language.

Despite the significant degree to which Germans were isolated from Russians, linguistic borrowings from Russian began to appear in their language early on, even during the long journey to the migrants’ new home. Primarily, lexis required for everyday life were borrowed.

The authors of this article, in researching the Soviet variety of German in Russia, observed that the Russicism Arbuse appeared frequently in this variety, yet only rarely - as dictionary entries testify - in German used in Germany. Analysis revealed that Arbuse is one of the earliest and most widely spread Russicisms in the language of Germans from Russia. Likely it is through their particular code that the term made its way into German dictionaries.