• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1173

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The Functions of Russian in the Emerging Polish-Russian Mixed Code in Lithuania

Authors: Brazyte, Brigita
Submitted by: Brazyte, Brigita (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)

The collapse of the Soviet Union was closely followed by the political, demographic, socio-cultural and linguistic changes in the newly independent Baltic states. Among the three states, Lithuania is often regarded as the most successful one in implementing the shift from Russian towards the titular language and assimilating its non-titular populations (Hogan-Brun & Ramoniene 2005). However, 22 years post independence Russian still has a strong presence in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. It is not only the main language of the Russian minority, but it is also one of the languages used by the Polish community on a daily basis.

In this paper, I focus on the functions of Russian in the everyday language practices of the Polish community in Vilnius. The study is based on a corpus of 18 hours of recorded conversations, interviews and questionnaires, involving members of the Polish minority. The data has revealed numerous and frequent cases of alternation between the local variety of Polish and Russian, which suggests the emergence of a new, Polish-Russian mixed code.

The first criterion proposed to account for an emergence of a mixed code is language switching at discourse markers (Maschler 1998), which can be defined as sequentially dependent elements that bracket, or ‘frame’ units of talk (Schiffrin 1987). The present study aims to demonstrate how Russian discourse markers, such as adverbs вообщем (in general) and короче (briefly [speaking]), as well as such lexicalized phrases as знаешь (you know) and понимаешь (you understand) are used to supply metatextual information that is additional to what is contained in the main body of a sentence, and therefore can be inserted in a sentence without affecting its syntax. The latter function makes them particularly productive in a mixed discourse.

The second evidence of an emerging Polish-Russian mixed code is the frequent use of nonce borrowings, which are usually content words (Auer 1998). If they were to be grouped along the semantic lines, the majority of borrowings would fall under the category of slang/informal vocabulary. The present data displays numerous examples of the latter, which include words like пацан (young lad), тусоватся (to party), фигня(rubbish) etc. Although Polish equivalents do exist, speakers clearly prefer to import these lexical items from Russian. The presence of such vocabulary items reflects the cultural influence of Russian on the Poles in Lithuania. Russian films, music and TV programmes seem to be popular amongst the respondents, which also suggests that the media might be a potential source of informal vocabulary items.

The two criteria addressed in this paper, as well as the very fact that there are numerous and frequent cases of language alternation in the data point out towards the emergence of a Polish-Russian mixed code, where Polish acts as a base language and Russian ‘frames’ the discourse, as well as supplies some of the lexical content.