Shor-Russian Contact Features

Abstract

The territory of South Siberia has always been a melting pot of cultures, peoples and languages. The Shor people, an indigenous Turkic people of the area, are no exception: Ob'-Ugric, Mongolian and later Russian had their turn in playing a prominent role in the development of the Shor language; the genetically and areally close languages Khakas, Altay, Kumandy, Teleut have been in contact with Shor for centuries and contributed to its areal features. Contacts with Russian, a language of a completely different system, episodic in the earlier periods of the Shor language history, got more and more intense beginning with the seventeenth century, when the area was joined to the Russian Empire, and became a decisive factor in the Shor language development since the 1930s. One of the first Russian fortresses in South Siberia was built in Mountain Shoriya in 1618; it grew into the town of Novokuznetsk, today one of the most important industrial and cultural centers. Early Russian speaking migrants had to adopt a number of Shor traditional life patterns in order to survive in the severe Siberian climate; they also shared their own skills and knowledge with the Shors. This period is characterized by lexical borrowing processes between the Shor and the Russian languages. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Altay missionaries started propagating Christianity to the native population of South Siberia; they organized primary schools, published religious and educational literature and preached in the languages of indigenous peoples. In the time of the Stolypin reform at the end of the nineteenth century, the territory absorbed a considerable number of Russian settlers. But it was not until the 1930s that the Shor-Russian interaction became one-sided and menacing for the Shor language and culture. The cultural revolution of the early 1930s, which can be defined as the most flourishing period in the history of the Shor language, was followed by a long period of its neglect. This turn took place in the late 1930s when the industrial development of the region began. The mass influx of migrants for whom Russian was a lingua franca initiated assimilation processes, which created a threat to the very existence of the Shor nation. The long period (1942-1988) when Shor was neither written, nor taught at schools lowered the social status of the language as compared to Russian even more. As a result, the people began to give up their