Forms of address across languages

Formal and informal second person pronoun usage among Estonia's linguistic communities

Bibliographic Data

ID12859500
AuthorsRenate Pajusalu (0000-0003-0808-2680, corresponding author), Virve‐anneli Vihman (0000-0002-0874-1730), Birute Klaas, Karl Pajusalu (0000-0001-5554-5049)
Year2010
Volume7
Issue1
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIntercultural Pragmatics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1612-295X • E-ISSN: 1613-365X
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/iprg.2010.004
OpenAlexW2016005650
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited9

This paper examines linguistic politeness in a bilingual society, focusing on forms of address among Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia. We ask in what ways groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different norms of politeness and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal form of the second person pronoun, but we also investigate other aspects of sociolinguistic interaction. The analysis is based on university students' responses to a sociolinguistic questionnaire. Data from both native Estonian speakers in Estonia and native Russian speakers in Russia are compared with data from Russian speakers living in Estonia. We find that where differences are apparent between Estonian and Russian speakers, the Russian diaspora in Estonia falls between both of the majority groups

Diaspora · Estonian · Latvian · Linguistics · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Politeness · Pronoun · Sociology · Digital Communication and Language · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Gender Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology

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