Morphophonological Innovations in New Speakers’ Kashubian

New Speakers of minority languages are a special case which gives us a unique glimpse into variation and change. In such cases, language change at an accelerated pace tends to lead to profound changes in the structure of the language. Such developments are observable in Kashubian, a minority Slavic language spoken in East Pomerania. For the purpose of this study, spoken data consisting of responses to video stimuli was collected from a group of Kashubian speakers. Chosen morphophonological developments were analysed, especially repatterning and vowel substitution in nouns and verbs, as well as phonemic mergers and their consequences for the morphological structure.