Lexical Interference in Oral Speech of Shor-Russian Bilinguals

Abstract

The article introduces the Shor-Russian lexical interference as a speech phenomenon. It is determined by the peculiarities of the linguistic situation in the region and the nature of discourses where borrowings are recorded. Borrowings are opposed by the presence / absence of a Russian equivalent, the degree of development, etc. They are characterized by the types of discursive conditions that actualize the borrowings in the Russian speech. The study featured recordings of spontaneous oral speech of Shor-Russian bilinguals in the towns of Sheregesh and Tashtagol and in the village of Bolshaya Sueta (Kemerovo Region, 2017–2018). The recording time is 23 hours and encompasses more than 138,380 word tokens. The data were collected by field methods and analyzed with corpus methods, sociolinguistic questionnaires, and linguistic analysis. Interference as a speech phenomenon appeared to be stimulated by special communicative conditions, the imbalance of the language situation being one of them. The Russian language dominates functionally, while the functions of the modern Shor language are limited to intra-family communication, close groups of friends, and a marker of ethnocultural identity. Most borrowings remain a speech phenomenon. Entering the language-system, they are generally assessed as functionally limited, being actualized in the discourses of Shor identity. The ease of systemic-linguistic phonetic and morphological adaptation to the Russian language is determined by the high level of its acquisition in the studied type of bilingualism.

Keywords

• language contact
• sociolinguistics
• language situation
• lexical borrowing
• types of borrowings
• functioning of borrowings
• language adaptation