Analysis of Language Transfer Mechanisms Based on Russian-Language Internet Forums of Israel and USA

My study is generally dedicated to the language interference issues of Russian native speakers living in Israel and USA. My target group of people – those who moved to Israel and USA in adult age, so they are not heritage speakers. Actuality of this research is in fact that language usage of such speakers is not very well studied in comparison to heritage speakers. The main question of my paper is how the second language (L2) affects the native language (L1) in the daily usage of Russian speakers, and how gathered data from every forum correlate between each other. In my paper I study interference from Hebrew to Russian and from English to Russian of native Russian speakers abroad – in Israel and USA. Firstly, I figured out the changes of lexical and grammatical usage of words, studied the mechanism of language interference and analyzed the situations when the home country language (in our case – Russian) is replaced by a non-native, L2 language – Hebrew and English. Secondly, I created a frequency lists of Hebrew words mostly used by Russian native speakers of Israel and a frequency of English words mostly used by native Russian speakers in USA. Finally, I compared of the results of American Russian and Israeli Russian forums, figuring out the similarities and differences of these two researches. First hypothesis is that the most borrowed words will be special professional terminology, words connected with life spheres specific for immigration - financial, law terminology, and finally, words related to the household. Second hypothesis - there is a numeral correlation between certain foreign words with similar meanings. Third hypothesis: the most frequent borrowed words from both of the forums - American and Israeli one - are similar by meaning.