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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 624

Part of Session 142: Deconstructing the urban-rural dichotomy (Other abstracts in this session)

Urban-Rural Mobilities and the Fluidity of Sakha-Russian Code-mixing

Authors: Ferguson, Jenanne Kirsten
Submitted by: Ferguson, Jenanne Kirsten (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)

 In my doctoral research in Social Anthropology, I examine language policies and practices among bilingual speakers of Sakha (Yakut) and Russian in the northern city of Yakutsk in the Republic of Sakha-Yakutia in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District. These languages have been in contact for 350 years, and today bilingualism is well-established among indigenous Sakha. Due to a decline in agriculture and pastoralism since the early 1980s, many indigenous Sakha are relocating from rural areas to the city of Yakutsk, and in far higher numbers than ethnic Russians. Thus, Yakutsk is a rich site for examining how public language usage in the city is shaped by the migration of Sakha speakers from the villages, how village and city language practices differ for individuals, and how these ‘ways of speaking’ (Hymes 1974) are shaped by mobilities both physical and metaphoric (through communication technology, e.g. mobile phones).

Ways of speaking, as Blommaert (2010) notes, should be seen fundamentally through the lens of a “sociolinguistics of mobile resources”; as the movement between rural and urban becomes more frequent and fluid, so do the ways of speaking of those who are moving. In the Sakha case, language mixing happens most often at the word-level; however, variants of borrowed words exist that are considered ‘more Sakha’, or ‘more Russian’, not either/or. For example, the words ‘suruunalyn’ and ‘zhurnalyn’ both are accepted variants of the accusative form of the word ‘journal, magazine’ (borrowed from Russian ‘zhurnal’). However the former variant is seen as ‘more Sakha’ due to the phonological changes it has undergone; the latter is seen as more Russian. These examples speak to the necessity of conceptualizing language in a way that focuses less on the delineation of separate, distinct languages (Bailey 2007; Canagarajah 2006; Blommaert 2010), but seeks to understand how “the real and situated linguistic forms are deployed as part of the communicative resources by speakers to serve their social and political goals” (Makoni and Pennycook 2006:22).  This paper will analyse common patterns of urban speech and how speakers negotiate and understand these variations; I will then discuss how Sakha ways of speaking can index different kinds of belonging, depending on where the speaker originates and whether they are speaking in the city or the village, demonstrating that these ways of speaking, despite the mobility of speakers, are also rooted in localized practices (Pennycook 2010).

References:

Bailey, B. (2007). Heteroglossia and Boundaries. In M. Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. (pp.257-274). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge University.

Canagarajah, S. (2006).After Disinvention: Possibilities for Communication, Community and Competence. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds.), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp.233-239). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania.

Makoni, S., and Pennycook, A. (2006). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds.), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp.1-41). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a Local Practice. New York: Routledge.