Gendered Multilingualism in highland Daghestan: story of a loss

Dobrushina, Nina; Kozhukhar, Aleksandra; Moroz, George

doi:10.1080/01434632.2018.1493113

Cited by 46 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…As described by Nichols (2013), the traditional sociolinguistic ecology of the Caucasus, specifically Daghestan, involves a pattern of “asymmetrical vertical bilingualism” that is predicated on a social and economic division between highlanders, whose subsistence basis is centered on sheep breeding and crafts, and lowlanders, who are traders and farmers. Since markets in Daghestan were traditionally located in the lowlands, since the lowlanders' dormant fields provided pastures for the transhumant highlanders' sheep flocks in winter, and since there were opportunities for waged labor in the lowlands, there was pressure for highlanders—especially men, Dobrushina, Kozhukhar, and Moroz (2019)—to learn lowland languages, but not vice versa (see also Wixman, 1980 and Dobrushina, 2013 for details). This asymmetry is supported by prevalent local language ideologies: economically disadvantaged breeder's languages like Archi are considered not worth learning by economically more privileged farmers, and there are generally negative attitudes towards Archi, which has been called shajtan chat —the language of the devil– even by some of its native speakers (cf.…”

Section: The Social Dynamics Of Language Use In Mountainous Regionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another structuring—or rather, destructuring—factor of linguistic geography that dovetails with the abovementioned tier‐based structure (see Scott, 2009:18–19 for the relationship; they are not necessarily in contradiction with one another) is that mountain languages may exhibit discontinuous distributions: some are spoken in enclaves that are separated by areas in which the use of different languages prevails (cf. Dobrushina, Kozhukhar, & Moroz, 2019 for a detailed study of an Avar‐speaking community between Dargwa‐speaking villages). This is prominently the case for the Burushaski language of the Himalayas, whose two discontinuously distributed dialects on the upper courses of two river valleys are replaced at lower altitude by the Indo‐European Shina language.…”

Section: Language Distributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 3 Detailed information on patterns of multilingualism in Daghestan, including appealing interactive visualizations, are available from the Atlas of Multilingualism in Daghestan (https://multidagestan.com/), and compare Wixman (1980), Dobrushina (2013), and Dobrushina, Kozhukhar, & Moroz (2019). …”

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confidence: 99%

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Mountain linguistics

Urban

2020

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Language use in mountainous areas often exhibits special social dynamics. This contribution sketches some of the most salient patterns of language use in upland Southeast Asia ,the greater Himalayas, the Caucasus, the Central Andes, the New Guinea highlands, and touches upon the Alps and some highland areas of Africa and North America. Accumulated over long time, such patterns of use yield particular—often highly diverse, fragmented, and discontinuous—distributions of languages and language families in geographical space the precise characteristics of which also depend on prevailing local sociolinguistic and socioeconomic conditions. Generalization are still difficult since most observations are anecdotal rather than systematic: as far as language structure is concerned, languages spoken in mountainous regions are traditionally often attributed a “conservative” or “archaic” character, preserving inherited traits and patterns that are lost elsewhere; the inaccessibility of the terrain and the resulting relative social isolation are commonly invoked to explain this situation. More recently, mountain languages have also been claimed to feature peaks in the distribution of some typological properties, whether due to sociogeographical factors or, more controversially, even direct influences of the environment: ejectives, grammatical encoding of elevational or topographic information, and overall high levels of structural complexity.

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Section: The Social Dynamics Of Language Use In Mountainous Regionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Language Distributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mountain linguistics

Urban

2020

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…We do not discuss the gender patterns of the acquisition of Russian language, because this was the subject of another paper (Dobrushina et al, 2019). In general, men and women were very similar on their way to speak Russian, but one factor was relevant only for men—participation in wars and in military service.…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After the establishment of the Soviet administration in the 1920s, and especially from the mid-1930s, the spread of Russian was a process of major sociolinguistic shift (Alpatov, 2000; Dobrushina et al, 2019). Russian became the first language to function as a lingua franca and the language of written administration for the whole area.…”

Section: The Linguistic Ecology Of Dagestanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The rise of a lingua franca: The case of Russian in Dagestan

Dobrushina

Kultepina

2020

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims and objectives: In Dagestan, Russian is the language of education, urban way of life, and upward social mobility, and the means of communication between speakers of different languages. This is a result of a quick and drastic change. At the end of the 19th century, Russian was spoken by less than 1% of the population. The aim of this paper is to understand how such rapid spread of Russian as an L2 became possible. Approach: The study uses quantitative data on Dagestanians’ language repertoires. We relate the command of Russian to certain facts from people’s biographies, such as the level of education, migration, warfare and military service, and other professional experience, and run regression analysis. Data and analysis: The data were collected by the method of retrospective family interviews during numerous field trips to highland Dagestan. We use information on 3519 individuals collected in 27 villages. Findings/conclusions: We conclude that the compulsory school education introduced in Dagestan in the 1930s is the social mechanism that resulted in the spread of Russian and its later development into a lingua franca. Russian was imposed from above and supported by the ideology that associated it with future and progress. Originality: This is the first attempt to apply quantitative methods to a large collection of field data to reveal social mechanisms underlying the spread of a single L2 instead of local bilingualism. Significance/implications: The spread of one lingua franca across a large territory is attested in many areas. We suppose that lingua francas of different origin result from different constellations of social factors and show that in Dagestan lingua franca was imposed by the authorities via a systematic educational campaign. We also suggest it was the extreme linguistic diversity of Dagestan that brought Russian from a widely known L2 to a lingua franca.

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Ethnicity and fertility of descendants of rural-to-urban migrants: the case of Daghestan (North Caucasus)

Kazenin

Козлов

2021

Int. Migration & Integration

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Gendered Multilingualism in highland Daghestan: story of a loss

Cited by 46 publications

References 21 publications

Mountain linguistics

Mountain linguistics

The rise of a lingua franca: The case of Russian in Dagestan

Ethnicity and fertility of descendants of rural-to-urban migrants: the case of Daghestan (North Caucasus)

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