Address forms in Tatar spoken in Finland and Estonia

Abstract

Tatar minorities have lived in Finland and Estonia as a multilingual diaspora for more than a century. This study explores how the different generations of Tatars living in Finland and Estonia perceive polite forms of address, focusing on the choice of informal and formal second-person pronouns and the use of kinship terms. The research material includes 7 h 20 min of semi-structured interviews conducted with nine Tatars from Finland and ten Tatars from Estonia. The results suggest a parallel tendency of variation in the address forms among the Finnish and Estonian Tatar minorities. Specifically, the Tatars in Finland are more likely to use sin, the second-person singular form (T-form), than the Estonian Tatars. This is similar to Finnish, where the T-form is more extensively used than in Estonian and Russian, which are the main contact languages of Tatar in Estonia. The results also propose that Finnish and Estonian Tatar diaspora members use kinship terms less as a polite form of address and accept being addressed by their first name. However, in standard Tatar, it is perceived to be impolite to address the interlocutor by only their first name without a kinship term or title. Many of the participants were also aware of these pluriareal differences in the use of T-forms and the use of Sez, the second-person plural form (V-form), and kinship terms in Tatar, suggesting the existence of meta-linguistic awareness among Tatar speakers in terms of polite language use.