How to study multilingualism of the past: Investigating traditional contact situations in Daghestan

Abstract

Reconstructing contact situations for an unwritten language is a challenging task, as the sociolinguistic past of such speech communities is very rarely documented. The paper describes research in which a method of retrospective family interviews is applied, where respondents’ recollections about recent multilingual past and, in particular, about the language repertoires of their elder relatives, are converted into quantitative data. It is a case study of three neighboring villages in the mountains of Daghestan, each of which has its own first language. It is shown that the multilingual pattern in the cluster is now shifting from the knowledge of neighbor languages towards Russian – an external lingua franca which is not native to any of the communicants.

Mountain linguistics

“…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.…”

“…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. Dobrushina, 2013:388). As a result of the socioeconomic position of its speakers, lowland languages acted as regional lingue franche on a vertical basis, but “there is no traditional pan‐Caucasian lingua franca” (Nichols, 1992:15) 3…”

“…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). …”

Contact-induced usages of volitional moods in East Caucasian languages

“…For this reason, I adopted the following methodology. For those languages where I could contact the speakers personally, I asked them about the linguistic repertoire of their elder relatives (retrospective family interview method – for a discussion on the shortcomings of the method see Dobrushina, 2013). By doing this, I could address the language repertoire at the beginning of the 20th century, since 50–60-year-old speakers are usually aware of the languages that were spoken by their grandparents.…”

Non-linguistic Conditions for Causativization as a Linguistic Attractor

“… 2 Sources for the historical and sociolinguistic description in the next paragraphs include (Lavrov, 1953 ; Volkova, 1967 ; Wixman, 1980 ; Aglarov, 1988 , 1994 , 2002 ; Nichols, 2005 , 2016 ; Karpov and Kapustina, 2011 ; Dobrushina, 2013 ). Here and below, for each section I cite sources used and a few well-known overviews, selecting from a very large literature on each topic.…”