On the Question of the Cheboksary Shibboleth

Abstract

The work is devoted to the study of the shibboleth in the speech culture of the inhabitants of the capital of Chuvashia. A shibboleth is a word that has absorbed the specific features of a language and is used to identify people for whom this language is not native. The relevance of the study is due to the very existence of the phenomenon of shibboleth in the everyday life of the residents of Cheboksary, which has not yet been studied from the point of view of linguocheboksary. The purpose of the study is to formulate a language unit that maximally concentrates the specific features of the Russian speech of the inhabitants of the city of Cheboksary. The material of the study was the speech samples of Cheboksary residents, during the quantitative and qualitative analysis of which a shibboleth was derived in the form of an interrogative phrase “Skazhite, pozhaluysta, nasha konferencia budet zavtra?” (Tell me, please, will our conference be tomorrow?). At the same time, checking with a shibboleth involves the task of transforming the specified phrase into the Cheboksary regiolect of the Russian language. Completing the task according to the linguistic preferences prevailing in Cheboksary should lead to the invariant “Skazhite-ka, u nas konferencia zavtra budet, chto li?”. The author of the work simultaneously considers Russian shibboleths aimed at the Chuvash linguistic culture, and vice versa. In the Chuvash environment, words with a concentration of a kind of Chuvash phonetics can act as a shibboleth aimed at Russians. In turn, the reproduction of the Russian shibboleth in the Chuvash environment, due to the developed Chuvash-Russian bilingualism, practically does not present any problem in modern realities.

Keywords

• Chuvash language
• Russian language
• accent
• language contacts
• shibboleth
• акцент