Interferencia és kódváltás a mai udmurt beszélt nyelvben

Abstract

Zsuzsa Salánki – Natalia Kondratieva Interferences and code-switching in modern Udmurt language This study examines Udmurt–Russian bilingualism, language use, and code-switching of the older generation in the agglomeration of Izhevsk based on our own collected corpora. First we offer an overview of demography and language situation in the Udmurt Republic in Russia. Some villages have been gradually absorbed by the city during its growth between the 18th and the 20th century, while commuting from villages to the capital was prohibited until the 1960s (except for factories). This prohibition protected Udmurt speaking villages from language shift by living a separated life from the city. As we can see in the post-Soviet era, these old villages have been recently populated by middle class citizens by moving to these separate settlements, building modern family houses trying to escape the burdens of city living. Bilingualism has existed for half a century or more, although intergenerational language transmission does not exist anymore. We have been collecting data of this area since 2014 working with elderly Udmurt informants. We chose participative observation as our method as we took part in informal everyday conversations, and we recorded unstructured interviews. Contemporary spoken Udmurt can be identified in the best way with the substandard forms characterised by the extensive use of Russian linguistic elements. We focused on the examination of variability of different forms in practice, which helped us to find hidden interferences of Russian and Udmurt as the Russian elements have been udmurtised. Code-switching can occur in cases of nouns, verbs, conversation markers, focus particles and switching of basic sentences as well. We can summarise this study by highlighting the fact that wide use of code-switching means the beginning of structural changes. However, code-switching does not occur because of the lack of language competence. The spontaneous language norm strongly differs from Zsuz sa Sa lánki – Na talia Ko ndra tieva 208 the standard form of Udmurt, which phenomenon is usually treated negatively by the Udmurt linguistic literature as it measures these effects as the question of incorrectness in a prescriptive way. This negative, judgemental point of view blocks the extension of defining Udmurt language.