Russian Words in the Ossetic Speech: Corpus Observations

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Abstract

Ossetian (< IRANIAN < INDO-EUROPEAN) has interacted with Russian for at least two centuries, and most Ossetians are Ossetic-Russian bilinguals. The influence of Russian on the development of Ossetic vocabulary is well described (in particular, the appearance in the Ossetic lexicon of Russian words without Ossetian equivalents and their subsequent adaptation, e.g., скъола 'school' from Russian школа, стъол ‘table’ from Russian стол). At the same time, the functioning of Russian words that have Ossetic equivalents also deserves attention (e.g., больницæ instead of рынчындон ‘hospital’). This paper describes Russian words of the second type in the Ossetic speech (Iron dialect) based on the corpus of texts recorded in the village of Dargavs. The total number of Russian words in the studied texts is relatively small, but they occur regularly. In our study, we first presented quantitative data on their distribution: nouns and adjectives are the most frequent, followed by adverbs and discourse markers; verbs are less frequent. Particles, interjections, and conjunctions are rarely used in Russian; there are also few cases of interclausal alternation. Second, we have discussed the structural features of Russian words in the context of Myers-Scotton and Muysken's theories of code-mixing and code-switching. We have shown that in the terminology of Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language Frame model, islands of embedded language are common in non-single-word Russian phrases; less common are mixed (Matrix Language + Embedded Language) constituents in which Russian vocabulary is embedded in the Ossetic morphosyntactic frame; at the same time, there are very few word forms with Russian morphological markers (as opposed to "unmarked" forms). In Muysken's sense, insertion is more characteristic of the Ossetic speech than alternation, and there are no reliable cases of congruent lexicalization. The nature and quantitative distribution of Russian words show that Ossetic does not seem to be a language subject to language shift.

About the authors

Irina Andreevna Khomchenkova

Vinogradov Russian Language institute RAS; Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Lomonosov Moscow University “Preservation of the World Cultural and Historical Heritage”; Institute of Linguistics RAS

Email: irina.khomchenkova@yandex.ru
Moscow, Russia

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