Dialectal variation and language contact in Udmurt

• Applicant: Dr. Timofey Arkhangelskiy
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428175960

This is a continuation of a project dedicated to dialectal variation in Udmurt and potential role of language contact in it. Udmurt is one of the largest minority Uralic languages spoken in Russia. Since it was only standardized relatively recently, there is significant dialectal variation inside Udmurt, which is visible in the vocabulary as well as on all levels of grammar. While phonetics and vocabulary of the dialects, as well as certain morphological forms, have been described pretty well, the same cannot be said about most levels of grammar, such as grammatical semantics, syntax and information structure. One important dimension in which dialectal variation could be explored is language contact. Udmurt has been in contact with Russian for several centuries and with Turkic languages, Tatar and Bashkir, for almost a millennium. Some of the dialects have been affected more than others, and presumably many differences between dialects could be at least partially explained by the contacts they have had. My project aims at the description of a number of specific grammatical constructions and phenomena, which have not been extensively studied across Udmurt dialects. After describing these phenomena and dialectal differences between them, my main goal is to explain how they appeared and whether language contact was likely to play any role in it. Special attention is paid to the Beserman variety, which I have studied since 2012. It has recently been classified as a separate language, but is close to Udmurt and combines traits of Northern and Southern dialectal groups. Methodologically, the project is data-driven. It is based on fieldwork and on linguistic corpora. All corpora collected in the course of the project will be released and could be reused in other research on Udmurt and Beserman. In place of the originally planned fieldwork in Russia, I am going to conduct two field trips to the Estonian Udmurt community, which is large and dialectally diverse.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants