What is it about?
This book looks at the spread of Russian as a language of power and considers the impact of contact with other languages on specific varieties of Russian, namely on the dialect of Russian spoken in the city of Odessa from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and on Russian lexifier creoles. We analyze how to reconstruct patterns in spoken language based on written, literary texts and show how sociolinguistic variation is used by different authors in their works. Variation refers to the observable differences in language use among speakers and includes variation in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and meaning. We contribute to current sociolinguistic theory by focusing on historical variation in Russian, which is largely unstudied from this perspective. The analysis of Odessan Russian is particularly interesting as it is a dialect of Russian that is largely known through jokes and comedians today.
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Why is it important?
It is a natural and fundamental characteristic of language, At a time when linguistic research is increasingly interested in variation and how it is used in different languages, it is important to be able to reconstruct historical variation that was not explicitly documented or described. We provide a methodology for doing this, how to define the variables and how to interpret their usage.
Perspectives
Researching this book was an exciting hunt for evidence about how a dialect that is largely lost was spoken back when it was alive, taking us to a wide variety of different sources (historical, legal, and linguistic). We hope it will inspire others to look at dialogue in literature and other non-canonical sources of linguistic material to understand how language was actually spoken, and how different forms can be used to index different social meanings.
Professor Lenore A. Grenoble
University of Chicago
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages, November 2022, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/impact.52.
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