Contact-induced language change in situations of non-stable bilingualism—its limits and modelling: Slavic (social) dialects in Albania

• Applicant: Dr. Maxim Makartsev
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429823235

The aim of the project is to create a model of language contact in a situation of unstable bilingualism for languages that are part of one sprachbund, but of different subgroups of Indo-European, and to define the limits of the structural impact that a socially dominant language might have on minority languages. Methods of statistical language research and social dialectology will be used. Such methods have not previously been used for the constellation of languages under scrutiny, and this model will complement the typology of language contacts researched so far.The data for the project will be taken from five Slavic dialects in Albania used by migrant communities in urban settings that are in contact with the Albanian language. These dialects initially have different structural affinity to Albanian. In urban communities these dialects undergo levelling with each other and other Slavic dialects, and are subjected to an intensive influence from Albanian as well as from standard Slavic languages. In some cases, the Albanian influence leads to the emergence of mixed forms of speech that have higher structural affinity with Albanian compared to the initial structure of the dialects. Among the characteristic features of these forms of speech are simplified inflection, shrinkage or loss of infinitive and new contact features. Some of these changes increase the affinity not only to Albanian, but also to common Balkan linguistic sprachbund type.The publications arising from the project will describe the continuing process of structural convergence of Slavic and other languages on the Balkans, explore the limits of such convergence, and demonstrate a further spread of the innovations to monolingual Slavic speakers. The situations of language contact under scrutiny are taken as a model case for other situations of Slavic-non-Slavic language contact in the Balkans in the past that have led to the creation of the Balkan sprachbund.The project requires gathering linguistic material, compiling a language corpus of Slavic dialects in Albania with grammatical annotation, as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis. The quantitative analysis will show which socio-biographic and linguistic parameters influence linguistic variation and will demonstrate the direction and the intensity of language change in Slavic dialects in Albania. The qualitative approach will allow to conduct a socio-biographic analysis and to describe the symbolic features of different language varieties for language communities and impact of these features on variation and change.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Russia
• Cooperation Partner: Elena Uzeneva, Ph.D., until 3/2022