Original scientific paper

https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2019.087.05

Evidence of syntactic convergence among Russian–Sakha bilinguals

Lenore A. Grenoble orcid.org/0000-0001-8810-7395 ; The University of Chicago
Jessica Kantarovich orcid.org/0000-0002-8853-9689 ; The University of Chicago
Irena Khokholova orcid.org/0000-0003-0066-7537 ; M. K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University
Liudmila Zamorshchikova orcid.org/0000-0001-5541-8613 ; M. K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University

Abstract

This paper illustrates the implementation of two basic experiments to test word order changes in Russian and Sakha, languages in long–standing contact. We hypothesize that changes in word order may correlate with deeper structural changes and la nguage shift. The experiments show that some speakers are shifting from Sakha to Russian: 4 from a sample of 30 speakers could not produce texts in Sakha, and one third of the sample produced sentences with some errors. At the same time, there were a significant number of mistakes in the Russian production experiments, indicating interference from Sakha and/or imperfect learning. A sociolinguistic questionnaire showed a high level of
accuracy between speakers’ self–assessment of their proficiency in each of the target languages as measured by the experiments shown here. Moreover, the simple experiments themselves revealed a number of other production errors and proved to be a reasonable indicator of less than fluent proficiency and of at least the initial stages of language shift.

Keywords

contact; word order change; language shift; Sakha; Russian

Hrčak ID:

223084

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/223084

Publication date:

20.7.2019.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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