Language contact in Daghestan: Quantitative research in multilingualism and lexical borrowing
NRU HSE, School of Linguistics, Linguistic Convergence Laboratory
NRU HSE, School of Linguistics, Linguistic Convergence Laboratory
Daghestan is an area of centuries long contact between dozens of only distantly related (and sometimes unrelated) languages. Structural alignment and lexical interactions between these languages and multilingualism across language communities seem to be a common knowledge for all researchers working in the area. This common knowledge is not yet however translated into hard and comparable figures. In this course, we will discuss methods and results of a going-on study of language contact in highland Daghestan. Our research focuses on methods of data collection and their statistical interpretation.
In the first part of the course, we discuss data obtained through mass interviewing of inhabitants of highland Daghestan about their and their elder relatives' linguistic repertoires. Presently, our database includes some 5,000 people from different locations. We check the validity of indirect method of data collection (asking about elder relatives' repertoires); discuss bilingual patterns (symmetrical vs. asymmetrical vs. lingua franca); demonstrate differences between local and distant multilingualism; discuss gendered patterns and their change over time; spread of Russian. Interactive access to the data on multilingualism in Daghestan is available at multidagestan.com.
In the second part of the course, we proceed to quantificational studies of lexical contact and how they map onto what we already know about bilingualism. We discuss preliminary results of loanwords collection in the field. We collect the same wordlist from different people in the same village and from neighbouring villages. We demonstrate that the rate of lexical influence from a dominant language does not seem to clearly correlate with the distance from the linguistic border or with the rate of bilingualism in this language; but that, surprisingly, the list of borrowed lexical items may differ between neighboring villages. This suggests that conventionalization of loanwords may happen independently in neighboring villages speaking the same language which thus constitute, in terms of lexical contact, independent language.
Links to the video recordings: