Project leader:
Prof. Dr. Diana Forker
Cooperation partners:
Prof. Dr. Lenore Grenoble, U Chicago
Dr. Zaira Khalilova, Russian Academy of Science
Dr. Zarina Molochieva, Universität Kiel
Period:
2019–2024
Funding:
Heisenberg-Fellowship by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Project description:
Language contact is important for researching human history because languages can preserve traces of contact that even thousands of years later can give us hints about migration histories. The project focuses on the functional and structural constraints of language contact between pairs of languages in asymmetrical contact situations, more specifically between Russian and East Caucasian languages (in particular Hinuq, Bezhta, Sanzhi Dargwa and Chechen). The aim of the project is to systematically study language contact phenomena from a structural as well as from a sociolinguistic perspective. The project will draw on methods that have successfully been used for the study of contact and bilingualism between large speech communities such as English-Spanish or English-Russian. It consists in controlled questionnaire studies and experiments (translation tasks, story retelling) as well as corpus studies to ensure that we simultaneously investigate comparable data and data from natural corpora.
The project will have broader implications for language contact studies, historical linguistics and areal typology beyond the field of Caucasian studies. General research questions to be studied are:
- Which features play decisive roles when diverse languages are in contact with the same dominant language (Russian)?
- Is the outcome similar or do we find differences that can be explained by diverging sociolinguistic situations or typological and genetic differences?
- Which areas of ancient and recent contact zones in the Caucasus can we identify through the systematic study of the core vocabulary?
- What does this tell us about cultural and political developments?