Sprachkontakt in der Geschichte des archaischen Lokativs im binnenslawischen Vergleich (anhand der Nowgoroder Birkenrindentexte)

Summary This paper examines the history of the Slavic locative viewed from the perspective of language contact(s) in diachronic language change. From a comparative study of Slavic languages, it transpires that whereas in most of these languages the locative was replaced by a prepositive well before the emergence of a written tradition, in the North East Slavia, notably in the Old Novgorodian dialect, it was preserved in certain lexical groups until the 13th century. By studying the use of the locative in the corpus of Novgorodian birchbark texts (11th–15th centuries), the paper argues that language contact(s) have both a catalyzing and a conserving function in language change.