This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figur... more This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, ...
This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Na... more This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Nakh-Daghestanian) based on several years of team fieldwork. Mehweb is spoken in one village community in Daghestan, Russia, with a population of some 800 people, In many ways, Mehweb is a typical East Caucasian language: it has a rich inventory of consonants; an extensive system of spatial forms in nouns and converbs and volitional forms in verbs; pervasive gender-number agreement; and ergative alignment in case marking and in gender agreement. It is also a typical language of the Dargwa branch, with symmetrical verb inflection in the imperfective and perfective paradigm and extensive use of spatial encoding for experiencers. Although Mehweb is clearly close to the northern varieties of Dargwa, it has been long isolated from the main body of Dargwa varieties by speakers of Avar and Lak. As a result of both independent internal evolution and contact with its neighbours, Mehweb developed some deviant properties, including accusatively aligned egophoric agreement, a split in the feminine class, and the typologically rare grammatical categories of verificative and apprehensive. But most importantly, Mehweb is where our friends live.
Abstract
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of l... more Abstract
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus , 2020
This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figur... more This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, Dagestan. Data in the chapter are based both on official sources (censuses), on information provided by experts and on the authors’ own work in the field.
Complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain expletive negation, which is negative marking w... more Complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain expletive negation, which is negative marking without negative meaning. Expletive negation in fear-complements regularly co-occurs with non-indicative moods, such as subjunctive, conjunctive, or conditional. The aim of this paper is to provide a diachronic explanation for the phenomenon of expletive negation in complement clauses of fear-verbs. Based on data from various languages, I will show that cases of expletive negation after verbs of fear can be divided into several groups, each with a different origin. Fear complement clauses can derive from embedded polar questions, paratactic constructions expressing a wish, or from negative purpose clauses. Complement clauses with polar questions usually contain an indicative verb form, while clauses based on the expression of a wish often have non-indicative verb forms. The paper also discusses cases in which expletive negation is lost.
Aims and hypothesis: The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I tes... more Aims and hypothesis: The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I test the hypothesis that the uses of volitional forms (optative, imperative, hortative and jussive) in complement clauses of the verbs of wish and in purpose clauses in East Caucasian languages evolve under the influence of Azerbaijanian. Design/methodology/approach and data and analysis: The data of 13 languages are considered in the paper. To prove that shared features are contact-induced, two control languages are included in the sample. Archi belongs to the same genetic group as the languages that use volitionals in subordinate clauses, but is exposed to Azerbaijanian to a lesser extent. Axaxdərə Akhvakh belongs to another group, but has strong contacts with Azerbaijanian due to recent migration. Findings/conclusions: A survey shows that volitionals are used in subordinate clauses most extensively in those languages whose speakers exhibit a high level of bilingualism in Azerbaijanian, a...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger th... more Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers. Design/methodology/approach: We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size. Data and analysis: Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people). Findings/conclusions: The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community. Originality: The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data. Significance and implications: Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people. Limitations: The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
Aims: The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualis... more Aims: The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualism, a type of language ecology typical of-but not exclusive to-indigenous communities with small numbers of speakers. We identify the similarities and differences among situations of such multilingualism, which lay the foundations for a future typology of this kind of language ecology. Approach and data: We outline the importance of language ideologies for multilingualism in small-scale societies, highlight the sources of this type of language ecology, with a special focus on the impact of marriage patterns, discuss to what extent situations of small-scale multilingualism are truly egalitarian and symmetric, and survey the different methods used in the study of this domain. In order to do so, we survey studies devoted to multilingualism in indigenous communities of all continents: the New World
We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based o... more We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based on a corpus of transcribed interviews, the Ustja River Basin Corpus. Eleven phonological and morphological variables are analyzed across 33 speakers born between 1922 and 1996 in a series of logistic regression models. We propose three characteristics for a comparison of the rate of loss of different variables: initial level, steepness, and turning point. We show that the dynamics of loss differs significantly across variables and discuss possible reasons for such differences, including perceptual salience, initial variation in the dialect, and convergence with regionally or socially defined varieties of Russian. In conclusion, we discuss the pros and cons of logistic regression as an approach to quantitative modeling of dialect loss. Our paper contributes to the study and documentation of Russian dialects, most of which are on the verge of extinction.
This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project basedon extensi... more This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project basedon extensive field study ofthe language repertoires of the residents of rural highland Daghestan.The Atlas will provide quantitative data on multilingualism across a relatively compact linguistic area, which is, culturally and socially, both homogeneous and diverse. It will represent a wide range of ethnic contact situations in a qualitatively and quantitatively comparable way. Thedata are collected by the method of retrospective family interviews, which is designed to obtain data about bilingualism in the past.The papergives a brief sociolinguistic overview of Daghestan, describes the method and its restrictions, explains the design of the future Atlas, and provides two sample chapters. One of the chapters describes three villages in northeast Daghestan, and the other describes two villages in southern Daghestan.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(2), 2019
The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast C... more The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast Caucasus) through the twentieth century. We show that historically, men were more multilingual than women, but this was not true to the same extent for all languages. Highlanders’ repertoires suggest a correlation between the social function of the second language and the degree to which its command was gendered. We also explore the dynamics of multilingualism from the generation born at the end of the nineteenth century to the generation born in the 1990s. We show that during the twentieth century local L2s were gradually displaced by Russian, and Daghestanian multilingualism lost its gendered character. We argue that these changes were caused by the introduction of Soviet schooling.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4... more This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Резюме В статье предлагается обзор электронной системы "Репозиторий исследова-ний вариативности" (https://vastry.ru/). Репозиторий предназначен для хра-не ния количественных результатов вариационных социолингвистических ис сле до ваний и создания интерактивных графиков на основе количествен-ных данных. В статье описаны некоторые экспериментальные исследования, охарактеризован репозиторий и возможности, которые он предоставляет ис следователям. Ключевые слова русский язык, социолингвистика, вариативность, фонетика, морфология, обу че ние, эксперимент Abstract The paper is an overview of the Repository of Variationist Research (https://vastry.ru/), an 1 online storage and interactive plotting tool for quantitative sociolinguistic * Исследование выполнено при поддержке гранта РНФ No 161802071 "Пограничный русский: оценка сложности восприятия русского текста в теоретическом, экспериментальном и статистическом аспектах".
This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figur... more This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, ...
This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Na... more This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Nakh-Daghestanian) based on several years of team fieldwork. Mehweb is spoken in one village community in Daghestan, Russia, with a population of some 800 people, In many ways, Mehweb is a typical East Caucasian language: it has a rich inventory of consonants; an extensive system of spatial forms in nouns and converbs and volitional forms in verbs; pervasive gender-number agreement; and ergative alignment in case marking and in gender agreement. It is also a typical language of the Dargwa branch, with symmetrical verb inflection in the imperfective and perfective paradigm and extensive use of spatial encoding for experiencers. Although Mehweb is clearly close to the northern varieties of Dargwa, it has been long isolated from the main body of Dargwa varieties by speakers of Avar and Lak. As a result of both independent internal evolution and contact with its neighbours, Mehweb developed some deviant properties, including accusatively aligned egophoric agreement, a split in the feminine class, and the typologically rare grammatical categories of verificative and apprehensive. But most importantly, Mehweb is where our friends live.
Abstract
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of l... more Abstract
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus , 2020
This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figur... more This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, Dagestan. Data in the chapter are based both on official sources (censuses), on information provided by experts and on the authors’ own work in the field.
Complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain expletive negation, which is negative marking w... more Complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain expletive negation, which is negative marking without negative meaning. Expletive negation in fear-complements regularly co-occurs with non-indicative moods, such as subjunctive, conjunctive, or conditional. The aim of this paper is to provide a diachronic explanation for the phenomenon of expletive negation in complement clauses of fear-verbs. Based on data from various languages, I will show that cases of expletive negation after verbs of fear can be divided into several groups, each with a different origin. Fear complement clauses can derive from embedded polar questions, paratactic constructions expressing a wish, or from negative purpose clauses. Complement clauses with polar questions usually contain an indicative verb form, while clauses based on the expression of a wish often have non-indicative verb forms. The paper also discusses cases in which expletive negation is lost.
Aims and hypothesis: The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I tes... more Aims and hypothesis: The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I test the hypothesis that the uses of volitional forms (optative, imperative, hortative and jussive) in complement clauses of the verbs of wish and in purpose clauses in East Caucasian languages evolve under the influence of Azerbaijanian. Design/methodology/approach and data and analysis: The data of 13 languages are considered in the paper. To prove that shared features are contact-induced, two control languages are included in the sample. Archi belongs to the same genetic group as the languages that use volitionals in subordinate clauses, but is exposed to Azerbaijanian to a lesser extent. Axaxdərə Akhvakh belongs to another group, but has strong contacts with Azerbaijanian due to recent migration. Findings/conclusions: A survey shows that volitionals are used in subordinate clauses most extensively in those languages whose speakers exhibit a high level of bilingualism in Azerbaijanian, a...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger th... more Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers. Design/methodology/approach: We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size. Data and analysis: Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people). Findings/conclusions: The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community. Originality: The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data. Significance and implications: Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people. Limitations: The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
Aims: The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualis... more Aims: The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualism, a type of language ecology typical of-but not exclusive to-indigenous communities with small numbers of speakers. We identify the similarities and differences among situations of such multilingualism, which lay the foundations for a future typology of this kind of language ecology. Approach and data: We outline the importance of language ideologies for multilingualism in small-scale societies, highlight the sources of this type of language ecology, with a special focus on the impact of marriage patterns, discuss to what extent situations of small-scale multilingualism are truly egalitarian and symmetric, and survey the different methods used in the study of this domain. In order to do so, we survey studies devoted to multilingualism in indigenous communities of all continents: the New World
We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based o... more We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based on a corpus of transcribed interviews, the Ustja River Basin Corpus. Eleven phonological and morphological variables are analyzed across 33 speakers born between 1922 and 1996 in a series of logistic regression models. We propose three characteristics for a comparison of the rate of loss of different variables: initial level, steepness, and turning point. We show that the dynamics of loss differs significantly across variables and discuss possible reasons for such differences, including perceptual salience, initial variation in the dialect, and convergence with regionally or socially defined varieties of Russian. In conclusion, we discuss the pros and cons of logistic regression as an approach to quantitative modeling of dialect loss. Our paper contributes to the study and documentation of Russian dialects, most of which are on the verge of extinction.
This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project basedon extensi... more This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project basedon extensive field study ofthe language repertoires of the residents of rural highland Daghestan.The Atlas will provide quantitative data on multilingualism across a relatively compact linguistic area, which is, culturally and socially, both homogeneous and diverse. It will represent a wide range of ethnic contact situations in a qualitatively and quantitatively comparable way. Thedata are collected by the method of retrospective family interviews, which is designed to obtain data about bilingualism in the past.The papergives a brief sociolinguistic overview of Daghestan, describes the method and its restrictions, explains the design of the future Atlas, and provides two sample chapters. One of the chapters describes three villages in northeast Daghestan, and the other describes two villages in southern Daghestan.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(2), 2019
The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast C... more The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast Caucasus) through the twentieth century. We show that historically, men were more multilingual than women, but this was not true to the same extent for all languages. Highlanders’ repertoires suggest a correlation between the social function of the second language and the degree to which its command was gendered. We also explore the dynamics of multilingualism from the generation born at the end of the nineteenth century to the generation born in the 1990s. We show that during the twentieth century local L2s were gradually displaced by Russian, and Daghestanian multilingualism lost its gendered character. We argue that these changes were caused by the introduction of Soviet schooling.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4... more This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Резюме В статье предлагается обзор электронной системы "Репозиторий исследова-ний вариативности" (https://vastry.ru/). Репозиторий предназначен для хра-не ния количественных результатов вариационных социолингвистических ис сле до ваний и создания интерактивных графиков на основе количествен-ных данных. В статье описаны некоторые экспериментальные исследования, охарактеризован репозиторий и возможности, которые он предоставляет ис следователям. Ключевые слова русский язык, социолингвистика, вариативность, фонетика, морфология, обу че ние, эксперимент Abstract The paper is an overview of the Repository of Variationist Research (https://vastry.ru/), an 1 online storage and interactive plotting tool for quantitative sociolinguistic * Исследование выполнено при поддержке гранта РНФ No 161802071 "Пограничный русский: оценка сложности восприятия русского текста в теоретическом, экспериментальном и статистическом аспектах".
Монография посвящена русскому сослагательному наклонению, точнее — грамматическим употреблениям ч... more Монография посвящена русскому сослагательному наклонению, точнее — грамматическим употреблениям частицы бы (б). Рассмотрены как сочетания с формой на -л (омонимичной прошедшему времени), так и с инфинитивом и с предикативами. Расширенное понимание сослагательного наклонения позволяет автору выделить центральные и периферийные употребления формы. Детально описано поведение наклонения в независимых клаузах и в придаточных предложениях, в том числе в условных, относительных, дополнительных, целевых и условно-уступительных придаточных. Исследование выполнено на материале Национального корпуса русского языка, широко применяется количественный метод анализа. Данные русского языка сопоставляются с другими языками.
Книга рассказывает о том, как менялись значения двадцати русских слов на протяжении двух столетий... more Книга рассказывает о том, как менялись значения двадцати русских слов на протяжении двух столетий, с начала XIX века (а иногда с середины XVIII века), когда свалка еще не была помойкой, мама не была матерью, а тёти не было вовсе. Читатель узнает, кого А.И. Герцен называл классными ворами, когда слово сволочь стало ругательством и как наречие пока превращалось в формулу прощания. Изменения значений слов представлены в виде хронологической шкалы, где момент первого появления нового смысла определен с точностью до десятилетия.
Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology, 2019
LINGUISTICS
Khanina O. V. Multilingual practices in the lower Yenisei area: a sociolinguistic stu... more LINGUISTICS Khanina O. V. Multilingual practices in the lower Yenisei area: a sociolinguistic study of the past. Amelina M. K. “The big shift to Tundra Nenets”: reconstruction of the sociolinguistic situation in Tukhard tundra (Taimyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky district) according to language biographies. Dobrushina N. R., Zakirova A. N. Avar as a lingua franca: a study in and around Karata. Pleshak P. S., Khomchenkova I. A. Code switching as a contrastive context in Hill Mari. Pupynina M. Yu., Koryakov Yu. B. Geography of multilingualism of peoples of Kolyma-Alazeia tundra in the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Khanina O. V., Shluinsky A. B. Future reference forms in Enets. Kumaeva M. V. Figures of speech and expressive means of language of the Mansi folklore.
ANTHROPOLOGY Dampilova L. S. Functions of mythological character in present-day household ceremony. Grinko I. A. Museum anthropology and museum management. Kazakov A. A., Kazakova O. M. Settlement Novozykovo 3 (Complex of Early Middle Ages). Kimeeva T. I., Nasonov A. A., Glushkova P. V. Religious syncretism in the Trans-Tom indigenous people in interdisciplinary context. Kufterin V. V., Dubova N. A. To the demography of Tajiks of Karategin: paleodemographic analysis of XVIII – XX cc. sample from Sicharog cemetery Petrov I. G. Magic rites, superstitions and beliefs, associated with recruits wires of the Chuvashs in Volga-Ural region: the middle of the XIX – beginning of the XX century. Skryabina N. P., Pechetova N. Y., Nikaeva T. M., Tarabykina M. V. Local anthroponymic system in the conditions of bilingualism.
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Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers.
Design/methodology/approach:
We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size.
Data and analysis:
Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people).
Findings/conclusions:
The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.
Originality:
The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data.
Significance and implications:
Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people.
Limitations:
The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers.
Design/methodology/approach:
We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size.
Data and analysis:
Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people).
Findings/conclusions:
The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.
Originality:
The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data.
Significance and implications:
Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people.
Limitations:
The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
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