Dialectal variation and language contact in Udmurt

• Applicant: Dr. Timofey Arkhangelskiy
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2019 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428175960

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

Udmurt is a minority language spoken in Russia. It belongs to the Uralic language family (and is thus a distant relative of Hungarian and Finnish). For more than 500 years, Udmurt has been in close contact with Turkic languages, first of all Tatar, which were socioeconomically dominant in the Volga-Kama area. Udmurt has diverse dialects; those in the South have been influenced by Tatar more than those in the North. Udmurt dialectology has a long tradition, but has mostly focused on phonology and vocabulary. The goal of this project was to study several aspects of Udmurt dialectal variation in the domain of grammar (morphosyntax) with the methods of field linguistcs and determine if Tatar played any role in shaping the dialectal disributions. For three topics—mutual order of particles, grammatical structure of the noun phrase and postpositional phrase—I described and analyzed the geographic distribution of dialectal variants for the first time. It turned out that almost all of the variation can be explained by language-internal processes rather than Tatar influence. This is surprising, given that Tatar is structurally quite similar in these domains; one might expect that it would be easy to reproduce grammatical patterns from a structurally compatible contact language. Apart from that, I described a peculiar series of indefinite pronouns (together with Aigul Zakirova), which can mean ‘I don’t know what/who...’ or ‘God knows what/who/...’ and were replicated or borrowed by many languages in the entire Volga-Kama area. Finally, together with Maria Usacheva and Maria Cheremisinova I wrote a comprehensive grammar of Beserman, an endangered variety spoken by around 2000 ethnic Besermans and formerly classified as an Udmurt dialect.

Publications

• Low-Resource ASR with an Augmented Language Model. Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Linguistics of Uralic Languages, 40–46. Syktyvkar, Russia (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics
  Timofey Arkhangelskiy
  
• Corpus of Udmurt newspapers
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey
  
• Dialectal Variation of Udmurt Discourse Clitics. Linguistica Uralica, 59(2), 100-129.
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey
  
• Etymology of the Udmurt enimitive uk and grammaticalization of discourse particles. Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Aikakauskirja, 2023(99).
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey
  
• 2003-2025. Beserman multimedia corpus (web-based version)
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey & Maria Usacheva
  
• Beserman multimedia corpus (recordings; Version 2.0) [Data set]
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey & Maria Usacheva
  
• Beserman multimedia corpus (transcripts; Version 2.0) [Data set]
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey & Maria Usacheva
  
• Spoken corpus of Udmurt dialects (Version 1.0) [Data set]
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey, Nikolai Anisimov & Iuliia Zubova
  
• Udmurt dialectal dataset (mixed questionnaire re- sponses) (Version 1.0) [Data set]
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey
  
• Udmurt dialectal dataset: discourse particles and other clitics (Version 1.0) [Data set]
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey
  
• Udmurt dialectal dataset: postpositions / relational nouns (Version 1.0) [Data set]
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey
  
• A Grammar of Beserman. BRILL.
  Arkhangelskiy, Timofey; Usacheva, Maria & Cheremisinova, Maria