Language Attrition and Death: Livonian in Its Terminal Phase

1 Christopher Moseley LANGUAGE ATTRITION AND DEATH: LIVONIAN IN ITS TERMINAL PHASE Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London March 1993 ProQuest Number: 10046089 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10046089 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 INTRODUCTION This study of the present state of the Livonian language, a Baltic-Finnic tongue spoken by a few elderly people formerly resident in a dozen fishing villages on the coast of Latvia, consists of four main parts. Part One gives an outline of the known history of the Livonian language, the history of research into it, and of its own relations with its closest geographical neighbour, Latvian, a linguistically unrelated Indo-European language. A state of Latvian/Livonian bilingualism has existed for virtually all of the Livonians' (or Livs') recorded history, and certainly for the past two centuries. Part Two consists of a Descriptive Grammar of the present- day Livonian language as recorded in an extensive corpus provided by one speaker. The description conforms to the framework suggested in the Lingua Descriptive Series Questionnaire (Comrie and Smith 1977) . The headings and subheadings in Part Two are thus numbered to correspond with the items in the Questionnaire (on the basis of which the volumes in the Lingua Descriptive Series were prepared). To extend the range of informants and to analyse features of discourse. Part Three provides a transcription of passages of speech by ten informants, with a literal interlinear translation, an English paraphrase and footnotes. Part Four consists of conclusions about the present state of survival of this fast-atrophying language, considered in the light of other studies of language attrition, and offers a tentative prognosis for its future in a country currently in a period of political, economic and social transition, on the western edge of the former Soviet Union. By every sociolinguistic criterion, the Livonian speech community in the last decade of the twentieth century is a defunct one. (1) Among the published studies in the field of inquiry into language contraction and death, it is difficult to find a language situation exactly parallel to that of Livonian. The most striking similarities are found in the East Sutherland Gaelic-speaking community in Scotland, as studied by Dorian (1982) (2). Like the Livonians, this community is coastal, with an economy based on fishing. Both have experienced slow erosion from the surrounding majority language since the twelfth century. Both communities speak dialects of a once-widespread language which have been isolated for centuries. In both cases the shift to the majority language is now almost complete, with most residents nowadays being monolingual in the majority language, and bilingualism found only in the oldest inhabitants. The numbers of speakers are also also roughly comparable: Dorian speaks of about two hundred 'fisherfolk descendants' in 1963, and under a hundred 'at present' (1982). Dorian's findings suggest, however, that the process of assimilation has gone further in East Sutherland Gaelic than in the Livonian case. She comments on the frequency of 'semi speakers': those who, despite self-assessments to the contrary, find it difficult to construct a grammatical Gaelic sentence. Their bilingualism is more passive than active. Two relevant differences from the Livonians should be borne in mind here. First, the East Sutherland community was being studied on its own territory, and therefore the sense of group cohesion would be greater. Secondly, there can be said to be a Gaelic standard to which the community can refer if it wishes; no such standard exists for the Livonians, who are the last speakers of their language as well as of their dialect. This fact is of ambiguous significance, however, and Dorian makes little reference to other Gaelic-speaking communities. In fact, she even points out that defensiveness against 'variant characteristics' is one of the few signs of any control over the language: regional variation is the obsessive interest of East Sutherland Gaelic speakers, not social variation. Every East Sutherland Gaelic speaker is on the alert at all times for the intrusion of a variant characteristic of one of the other villages. (3) She attributes the absence of social evaluation to the uniform occupational status of the speakers. The same might well be said in accounting for the absence of 'high' and 'low' variants of Livonian. Dorian acknowledges the presence of passive bilinguals in the speech community, but does not estimate their numbers or assess whether they can be described as part of the ethnolinguistic community. Published studies of language contraction have in recent years tended to concentrate either on the speech community or on the language itself. As Livonian has virtually ceased to function as a community language, this study concentrates on evidence for atrophy and change provided by the language itself. Evidence for this has been sought on four levels: syntactic, morphological. lexical and phonological. With the lapse of memory and loss of opportunities for discourse among the surviving speakers, one might naturally expect a shrinkage in the available range of expression at the first three of these levels, and under the influence of the majority language, a merging of the minority language's phonological features with it. There is a large body of evidence to suggest that syntactic simplification, specifically co-ordination at the expense of relativisation, is a feature of language attrition. Hill (1989) summarises the findings of other scholars in the introduction to her own statistical study of relativisation in two languages of Mexico: Reduction in the frequency of relative clauses in the usage of speakers in late stages of language death has been identified in languages of diverse genetic and typological affiliations: Cupeno and Luiseno (Hill 1973, 1978), Trinidad Bhojpuri (Durbin 1973), Tubatulabal (Voegelin and Voegelin 1977), East Sutherland Gaelic (Dorian 1981, 1982) and Dyirbal (Schmidt 1985). Relative clauses, along with other complex sentence phenomena, have also been reported as absent in pidgin languages, developing only upon creolization of a pidgin (Sankoff and Brown 1976). Low frequencies of complex sentences have been identified also in working-class (as opposed to middle-class) usage in British English (Bernstein 1972) , American English (Wolfram 1969) and French (Lindenfeld 1972). Van den Broeck (1977) identified the phenomenon in some speech contexts for working-class varieties of Flemish. A low rate of relativization in oral, as opposed to written, language in Western languages has also been frequently noted. (4) Among the studies of morphological change resulting from attrition are several that offer ready comparison with the Livonian/Latvian pairing, as the languages involved have similar origins. Cases in point are Gal's studies (1979, 1989) of Hungarian-German bilingualism in Austria and Maandi's (1989) observation of Estonian among immigrants in Sweden. With a statistically significant number of speakers at her disposal. Gal (1989) has collected and quantified examples of lexical innovation and loss that show some similarities to Livonian: more particularly in the use of separable Hungarian prefixes with verbs in new combinations based on German patterns. Unlike the Livonian case, the prefixes are translated rather than borrowed. (5) In her earlier study (1979), Gal notes: as both Hungarian and German have separable verbal prefixes, many of which indicate direction of motion and often correspond in the two languages, some prefixes on borrowed German verbs are translated into the Hungarian equivalents ein (G) = be (H), aus (G) = ki (H), auf (G) = fel (H) , 'in', 'out', 'up'. So for instance, belodul (H) from German dnlodn (G) 'invite', and kuzeccul (H) from German auss rtsn (G) 'stop or discontinue'. (6) Gal's observations concerned both morphological and lexical borrowing. She notes the particular semantic fields in which borrowing occurs: Borrowings are not limited to new technology or new semantic domains. On the one hand, recently introduced machines, Austrian political-bureaucratic titles and institutions, as well as obligations and privileges which Oberwarters have as Austrian citizens are named with German nouns and their Hungarian equivalents are known by few if any Oberwarters . .But there are also many German nouns and verbs now in use for which Hungarian direct equivalents do exist and that are often used side by side with the Hungarian forms. (7) Both of these phenomena observed by Gal can also be found in Livonian, and have spread as the language gives way to Latvian. The Livonian language shift, however, has brought with it not merely lexical but also morphological innovation, as such prefixes are not native to the language. By contrast, Maandi's (1989)

Load more