Designing а Questionnairе for Studying Linguistic Biographies of Heritage Speakers

The purpose of this study is to identify the pieces of biographical information that are most relevant for the study of Russian as a heritage language. It builds on a review of questionnaires for studying linguistic biographies that are currently used in articles and methodological materials by different researchers. We perform a critical analysis and comparison of these questionnaires, which aims at a more systematic and condensed approach to the gathering of relevant sociolinguistic data. This comparison showed that the most relevant types of biographical information are the following: (a) general biographical information, including data on the acquisition and proficiency in the languages of the participants, (b) information on language use in different communicative domains by the informant, (c) data on the attitudes of the informant towards the heritage language, and the language of the country of residence, (d) data on the informant's selfassessment of proficiency in the heritage language in general and mastery of basic skills. The research results can be useful not only for studying heritage languages, but also with a little refinement to studies on second and third language acquisition.