Language Features of Written Speech in Adult Bilinguals in the Conditions of Russian-Kyrgyz Bilingualism

An experimental study is devoted to identifying the peculiarities of written speech in Russian among adult bilinguals living in Kyrgyzstan. The experiment involved informants from three groups: with the first Kyrgyz, studied at a Kyrgyz-speaking school; with the first Kyrgyz, studied at a Russian-speaking school; with the first Russian. The research material was written narratives in Russian, obtained during the experiment supported with the MAIN narrative collection and analysis tool. A comparison of bilingual speech was carried out in order to identify deviations from the Russian speech standard, and to identify the most typical mistakes made by informants from different groups. The results of processing the experimental material obtained by statistical methods have shown that the degree of mastery of the second language is reflected primarily at the morphological level. It is shown that the informants of the two groups with the first Kyrgyz demonstrated differences in the degree of mastery of the spelling rules of the Russian language. Errors related to the use of lexical units (lexical and word-formation) are equally typical for different groups of informants with the first Kyrgyz, but they differ from informants with the first Russian. There were no significant differences in the speech of bilinguals at the syntactic, stylistic and punctuation levels. Assumptions are made about the causes of errors in the speech of Russian-Kyrgyz bilinguals.