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Linguistic Imperialism, Language Contact and Areal Convergence in Eastern Europe with a Focus on Slavic
THIS SEMINAR IS TAUGHT IN ENGLISH OR RUSSIAN DEPENDING ON SKILLS AND INTERESTS OF ITS PARTICIPANTS.
The languages of Europe today have been decisively shaped by linguistic and cultural contact and expecially by asymmetric relationships between different languages. Major 'imperial' languages that have shaped Eastern European languages include, at different times, German, Russian, Polish and Swedish that have influenced the smaller languages of Eastern Europe and Russia.
In this seminar, we first look at general conditions, mechanisms and outcomes of language contact and the history of linguistic imperialism and contact in Europe. We will then examine individual cases in Eastern Europe and Russia with a non-exclusive focus on Slavic languages.
This seminar will be taught in English or Russian and is accompanied by a practice seminar (TUTORIUM, Mo 12-14) where we work with multilingual, parallel as well as monolingual corpora and work with primary and secondary data.
General topics:
- Borrowing hierarchy: what is easily borrowed, what is less important
- Linguistic imperialism: concepts and applications in Europe
- language situation and borrowing: how do low prestige languages borrow from high prestige languages and vice versa (superstrate and substrate influence)
- leave no trace: language purism, or getting rid of contact influence (especially getting rid of German in Slavic)
- linguistic contact between closely related languages
Case studies we might look at include:
- Ukrainian centered: Ukrainian and Russian / Polish; historical and contemporary Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech ('Surzhyk')
- Belarusian centered: Belarusian and Russian / Polish; historical and contemporary Belarusian-Russian mixed speech ('Trasjanka')
- German-Slavic language contact: possible foci on Sorbian, Slovenian, Czech or Polish
- German and Estonian, Latvian
- Russian centered: contact to languages of the former Soviet Union, especially in the Baltic republics, Moldova, Central Asia, Mongolia
- Russian and contact with the languages of Russia, e.g. in the Caucasus |
