This 165th volume in the well-known and long-standing series "Specimina Philologiae Slavicae" represents the published version of a doctoral dissertation defended in 2010 by Wilma Rethage (formerly Wilma B. G Schuster) at the University of Giessen (Gießen), Germany. As the title of her dissertation indicates, Rethage concems herself here with various structural properties spécifie to the Russian language spoken today by both ethnie Russians and Russianspeaking ethnic Germans who have immigrated to Germany from Russia and other areas of the fomier Soviet Union. She approaches these properties from the perspectives of contact linguistics and sociolinguistics, while at the same time subjecting her data to both descriptive and statistical analysis.