Papers by Nina Dobrushina
The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus
This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figur... more This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, ...
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2018
Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology
В статье рассматриваются особенности языкового взаимодействия между несколькими соседними селами ... more В статье рассматриваются особенности языкового взаимодействия между несколькими соседними селами Ахвахского района Дагестана: Каратой, Тукитой, Тад-Магитлем и Тлибишо (условно названные в статье каратинской зоной). Жители этих сел, расположенных друг от друга на расстоянии 30-120 мин пешего хода, говорят на четырех разных языках: каратинском, тукитинском, ахвахском и багвалинском. В рамках многолетнего проекта изучения соседского многоязычия в разных регионах горного Дагестана в марте 2018 г. было проведено полевое исследование каратинской зоны. Для сбора данных применялся метод ретроспективных семейных интервью. Интервью предполагают выяснение языкового репертуара не только самих респондентов, но и тех их близких родственников, которых респондент помнит. Собранные качественные и количественные данные позволили выяснить, на каких языках общались друг с другом жители соседних сел до русификации и как происходит взаимодействие в настоящее время. Выяснилось, что коммуникация между непосредственными соседями в каратинской зоне осуществляется на аварском-т.е. в каратинской зоне используется модель лингва франка. На сегодняшний день более 90% населения четырех обследованных сел владеет аварским языком. Это отличает каратинскую зону от многих других регионов горного Дагестана. Более типичным является взаимодействие между дагестанскими селами на языке одного из соседей (асимметричный билингвизм). Взаимное владение языками друг друга (симметричный билингвизм) и лингва франка были менее распространены. На фоне высокого уровня владения аварским языком уровень активного знания языков соседей в каратинской зоне был и остаётся низким. Уровень пассивного знания, то есть способности понимать язык соседей, несколько выше. Показано, что пассивное знание языков соседей может быть несимметрично. В статье обсуждаются причины такой асимметрии. Высказано предположение, что понимание соседского языка обусловлено не только близостью языков, но и направлением социально-экономических контактов. Как и во всем Дагестане, в каратинской зоне распространилось знание русского языка, однако, в отличие от многих других мест, русский язык пока не вытеснил традиционные модели билингвизма.
Language Science Press, 2019
This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Na... more This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Nakh-Daghestanian) based on several years of team fieldwork. Mehweb is spoken in one village community in Daghestan, Russia, with a population of some 800 people, In many ways, Mehweb is a typical East Caucasian language: it has a rich inventory of consonants; an extensive system of spatial forms in nouns and converbs and volitional forms in verbs; pervasive gender-number agreement; and ergative alignment in case marking and in gender agreement. It is also a typical language of the Dargwa branch, with symmetrical verb inflection in the imperfective and perfective paradigm and extensive use of spatial encoding for experiencers. Although Mehweb is clearly close to the northern varieties of Dargwa, it has been long isolated from the main body of Dargwa varieties by speakers of Avar and Lak. As a result of both independent internal evolution and contact with its neighbours, Mehweb developed some deviant properties, including accusatively aligned egophoric agreement, a split in the feminine class, and the typologically rare grammatical categories of verificative and apprehensive. But most importantly, Mehweb is where our friends live.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2021
Abstract
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of l... more Abstract
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus , 2020
This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figur... more This chapter provides a sociolinguistic account of the languages of the Caucasus, including figures for speakers and their geographical distribution, language vitality, the official status of the languages, orthography, and writing practices. The chapter discusses language repertoires typical of different areas in the Caucasus, and their change over the 20th century. As a showcase, it provides an overview of traditional multilingualism in Daghestan, the most linguistically dense are in the Caucasus. It discusses various patterns of interethnic communication, including lingua franca and asymmetrical bilingualism. We show that bilingualism was gendered, and how Russian was spreading in the area as a new lingua franca. The chapter surveys the outcomes of language contact, covering both lexical borrowing (including main references to etymological research) and providing examples of structural convergence, with a special focus on the area of the highest language density in the Caucasus, Dagestan. Data in the chapter are based both on official sources (censuses), on information provided by experts and on the authors’ own work in the field.
Functions of Language, 2021
Complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain expletive negation, which is negative marking w... more Complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain expletive negation, which is negative marking without negative meaning. Expletive negation in fear-complements regularly co-occurs with non-indicative moods, such as subjunctive, conjunctive, or conditional. The aim of this paper is to provide a diachronic explanation for the phenomenon of expletive negation in complement clauses of fear-verbs. Based on data from various languages, I will show that cases of expletive negation after verbs of fear can be divided into several groups, each with a different origin. Fear complement clauses can derive from embedded polar questions, paratactic constructions expressing a wish, or from negative purpose clauses. Complement clauses with polar questions usually contain an indicative verb form, while clauses based on the expression of a wish often have non-indicative verb forms. The paper also discusses cases in which expletive negation is lost.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2016
Aims and hypothesis: The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I tes... more Aims and hypothesis: The aim of this article is to introduce a case of syntactic borrowing. I test the hypothesis that the uses of volitional forms (optative, imperative, hortative and jussive) in complement clauses of the verbs of wish and in purpose clauses in East Caucasian languages evolve under the influence of Azerbaijanian. Design/methodology/approach and data and analysis: The data of 13 languages are considered in the paper. To prove that shared features are contact-induced, two control languages are included in the sample. Archi belongs to the same genetic group as the languages that use volitionals in subordinate clauses, but is exposed to Azerbaijanian to a lesser extent. Axaxdərə Akhvakh belongs to another group, but has strong contacts with Azerbaijanian due to recent migration. Findings/conclusions: A survey shows that volitionals are used in subordinate clauses most extensively in those languages whose speakers exhibit a high level of bilingualism in Azerbaijanian, a...
International journal of bilingualism, 2021
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger th... more Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers.
Design/methodology/approach:
We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size.
Data and analysis:
Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people).
Findings/conclusions:
The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.
Originality:
The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data.
Significance and implications:
Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people.
Limitations:
The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
A typology of small-scale multilingualism, 2021
Aims: The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualis... more Aims: The paper aims at providing an exhaustive overview of studies of small-scale multilingualism, a type of language ecology typical of-but not exclusive to-indigenous communities with small numbers of speakers. We identify the similarities and differences among situations of such multilingualism, which lay the foundations for a future typology of this kind of language ecology. Approach and data: We outline the importance of language ideologies for multilingualism in small-scale societies, highlight the sources of this type of language ecology, with a special focus on the impact of marriage patterns, discuss to what extent situations of small-scale multilingualism are truly egalitarian and symmetric, and survey the different methods used in the study of this domain. In order to do so, we survey studies devoted to multilingualism in indigenous communities of all continents: the New World
Language Variation and Change
We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based o... more We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based on a corpus of transcribed interviews, the Ustja River Basin Corpus. Eleven phonological and morphological variables are analyzed across 33 speakers born between 1922 and 1996 in a series of logistic regression models. We propose three characteristics for a comparison of the rate of loss of different variables: initial level, steepness, and turning point. We show that the dynamics of loss differs significantly across variables and discuss possible reasons for such differences, including perceptual salience, initial variation in the dialect, and convergence with regionally or socially defined varieties of Russian. In conclusion, we discuss the pros and cons of logistic regression as an approach to quantitative modeling of dialect loss. Our paper contributes to the study and documentation of Russian dialects, most of which are on the verge of extinction.
Languages of the Caucasus
This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project basedon extensi... more This paper introduces the future Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan, a project basedon extensive field study ofthe language repertoires of the residents of rural highland Daghestan.The Atlas will provide quantitative data on multilingualism across a relatively compact linguistic area, which is, culturally and socially, both homogeneous and diverse. It will represent a wide range of ethnic contact situations in a qualitatively and quantitatively comparable way. Thedata are collected by the method of retrospective family interviews, which is designed to obtain data about bilingualism in the past.The papergives a brief sociolinguistic overview of Daghestan, describes the method and its restrictions, explains the design of the future Atlas, and provides two sample chapters. One of the chapters describes three villages in northeast Daghestan, and the other describes two villages in southern Daghestan.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(2), 2019
The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast C... more The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast Caucasus) through the twentieth century. We show that historically, men were more multilingual than women, but this was not true to the same extent for all languages. Highlanders’ repertoires suggest a correlation between the social function of the second language and the degree to which its command was gendered. We also explore the dynamics of multilingualism from the generation born at the end of the nineteenth century to the generation born in the 1990s. We show that during the twentieth century local L2s were gradually displaced by Russian, and Daghestanian multilingualism lost its gendered character. We argue that these changes were caused by the introduction of Soviet schooling.
Вопросы языкознания. № 4 , 2016
Статья посвящена проблеме использования сослагательного наклонения в универсальных условно-уступи... more Статья посвящена проблеме использования сослагательного наклонения в универсальных условно-уступительных придаточных типа Кто бы ни пришел, всех пускали. Показано, что употребление со-слагательного наклонения в этих придаточных не может быть объяснено через ирреальность, так как универсальные условно-уступительные придаточные часто синонимичны аналогичным конструкциям с индикативом и обозначают реальные ситуации. На обширном корпусном материале продемонстри-ровано, что сослагательное наклонение в этих придаточных служит для обозначения нереферентности хабитуальных ситуаций. Важным доказательством служит выбор видовых форм: если придаточное содержит индикатив, то предикат не может стоять в форме прошедшего времени совершенного вида, в то время как сослагательное наклонение снимает это ограничение. This study considers the use of the subjunctive in universal conditional concession (UCC) clauses of the type Kto by ni prishel, vsekh puskali ('Whoever would come was admitted'). In these contexts, the use of the subjunctive cannot be explained by the irrealis component of its semantics, because it can be substituted with the indicative and apparently introduces real situations. A corpus analysis of this type of subordinate clauses suggests that here the subjunctive designates non-referential, habitual situations. The claim is supported by the evidence from the choice of aspect-in indicative UCC clauses, the predicate cannot be per-fective whereas the use of the subjunctive removes this constraint. Введение Сослагательное наклонение часто встречается в условно-уступительных придаточ-ных, которые вводятся сочетанием одного из местоименных слов кто / что / когда / где / куда / откуда / какой / как / сколько / чей (в терминологии [Апресян 2015] и [Иомдин 2010], «к-местоимением») и частицы ни: © 2016 * В статье использованы результаты проекта «Тенденции развития языка в корпусном отражении», выполненного в рамках Программы фундаментальных исследований НИУ ВШЭ в 2016 г. Автор благодарен за советы и замечания, высказанные анонимными рецензентами, В. Ю. Апре-сян, А. Б. Шлуинским и особенно С. С. Саем. Все ошибки и недочеты на совести автора.
Slověne 2018 №1, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4... more This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Резюме В статье предлагается обзор электронной системы "Репозиторий исследова-ний вариативности" (https://vastry.ru/). Репозиторий предназначен для хра-не ния количественных результатов вариационных социолингвистических ис сле до ваний и создания интерактивных графиков на основе количествен-ных данных. В статье описаны некоторые экспериментальные исследования, охарактеризован репозиторий и возможности, которые он предоставляет ис следователям. Ключевые слова русский язык, социолингвистика, вариативность, фонетика, морфология, обу че ние, эксперимент Abstract The paper is an overview of the Repository of Variationist Research (https://vastry.ru/), an 1 online storage and interactive plotting tool for quantitative sociolinguistic * Исследование выполнено при поддержке гранта РНФ No 161802071 "Пограничный русский: оценка сложности восприятия русского текста в теоретическом, экспериментальном и статистическом аспектах".
Russian Linguistics, 2012
In many languages of the world, the forms in the irrealis domain (subjunctive, conjunctive, condi... more In many languages of the world, the forms in the irrealis domain (subjunctive, conjunctive, conditional) are also used in complement clauses. The set of verbs that require subjunctive complementation is similar but not identical across languages. The paper identifies Russian verbs that license the subjunctive in complement clauses, either as the only option or as an alternative to the indicative. Based on the Russian National Corpus, a list of these predicates is compiled, with relative frequencies of subjunctive vs. indicative for each predicate. The main result of the study is to distinguish two types of subjunctive complement clauses. Most predicates belong to the group which is similar to purpose clauses with čtoby 'so that/to/in order to', both semantically and syntactically. The subject of the main predicate is involved in the situation described by the subordinate clause, by intention, causal relations or by the wish to have the described situation come true/happen/take place. The second, minor group includes epistemic uses of čtoby with e.g. somnevat'sja 'doubt' and other predicates in the context of negation, interrogation and other constructions expressing low probability.
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Papers by Nina Dobrushina
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers.
Design/methodology/approach:
We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size.
Data and analysis:
Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people).
Findings/conclusions:
The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.
Originality:
The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data.
Significance and implications:
Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people.
Limitations:
The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
Aims and objectives:
In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible.
Approach:
The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis.
Data and analysis:
The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages.
Findings/conclusions:
We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress.
Originality:
This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism.
Significance/implications:
The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.
The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers.
Design/methodology/approach:
We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size.
Data and analysis:
Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people).
Findings/conclusions:
The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.
Originality:
The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data.
Significance and implications:
Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people.
Limitations:
The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.
Khanina O. V. Multilingual practices in the lower Yenisei area: a sociolinguistic study of the past.
Amelina M. K. “The big shift to Tundra Nenets”: reconstruction of the sociolinguistic situation in Tukhard tundra (Taimyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky district) according to language biographies.
Dobrushina N. R., Zakirova A. N. Avar as a lingua franca: a study in and around Karata.
Pleshak P. S., Khomchenkova I. A. Code switching as a contrastive context in Hill Mari.
Pupynina M. Yu., Koryakov Yu. B. Geography of multilingualism of peoples of Kolyma-Alazeia tundra in the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.
Khanina O. V., Shluinsky A. B. Future reference forms in Enets.
Kumaeva M. V. Figures of speech and expressive means of language of the Mansi folklore.
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