A case-study in historical sociolinguistics beyond Europe

Reconstructing patterns of multilingualism in a linguistic community in Siberia

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21227165
AutoresOlesya Khanina (0000-0001-5930-4656, Institute of Linguistics, autor correspondente), Miriam Meyerhoff (0000-0002-2599-1870, Victoria University of Wellington)
Ano2018
Volume4
Fascículo2
Páginas221-251
Data de publicação2018-10-25
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Historical Sociolinguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2199-2894 • E-ISSN: 2199-2908
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/jhsl-2017-0016
OpenAlexW2897509880
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas18

A collection of traditional and ‘old life’ stories recorded in the late 1940s is used to reconstruct the sociolinguistic situation of the Enets community in Northern Siberia from the 1850s until the 1930s. The Enets had regular contacts with a number of neighbouring indigenous peoples (Nganasans, Tundra Nenets, Selkups, Evenkis, Dolgans) and later with Russian newcomers. The oral histories often comment on language use, and as a result we can reconstruct not only the languages that the Enets people used in this period, but also the contexts in which they used them. The Enets community’s multilingualism was typically characterized by command of key neighbouring languages, with the occasional command of other more (geographically and socially) remote ones. With close neighbours, language choice seems to have had limited social load, while in cases of trade or agonistic contact, the choice of language in interethnic communication seems to have followed a principle of asymmetric convergence towards the language of the party with the greatest contextual social power. The analysis is founded on a database of dozens of communicative events mentioned in the oral stories (over 50 are analyzed). Ongoing fieldwork on the modern sociolinguistic situation suggests that until quite recently there was considerable stability in the sociolinguistic norms governing multilingual interaction among the Enets

Indigenous · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistic Variation and Morphology