Russian speech in the language contact zone: active trends in deviations from the speech standard

Abstract

In the article, the authors characterize the functional version of the Russian language, which was formed in the language contact zone in the places of compact settlement of the the Shor, Khakass, and Tatar speakers in the south of Western Siberia. Spontaneous oral speech of bilinguals is presented as an independent subsystem that can be analysed according to the norms of the written codified Russian literary language. The authors discuss what types of deviations from the speech standard (DLS) prevail in the speech of Turkic-Russian bilinguals and whether deviations of speech norms depend on the basic sociolinguistic characteristics of native speakers - age and education. The material includes about forty hours of recorded texts, marked by deviations from the speech standard. The data were preprocessed before the analysis, with DLS tags combined by language levels: Phon, Morph, Synt, Lex, Disc., and files loaded into the R programming language environment. The statistical analysis has shown significant quantitative predominance of DLS conditioned by oral spontaneous communication. They include variants of hesitation and formal-semantic and functional incompleteness of utterances. The second most frequent DLS are various types of deviations of syntactic coherence and constructive correctness of utterances. Significantly inferior to them are DLS at the Lexical and morphological levels. However, deviations from the norms of syntactic coherence in a significant number of cases manifest interference caused by the influence of native languages of bilinguals. The dependence of DLS distribution on the basic sociolinguistic characteristics of bilingual speakers - age and education - was found only for groups of morphological and syntactic errors.