(English below)
В Институте возобновил работу открытый семинар по языковым контактам, проводимый на базе Группы по изучению контактного взаимодействия русского языка с языками коренных народов России.
На заседании 9 февраля 2026 года выступила Наталья Марковна Стойнова (к.ф.н., научный сотрудник Университета Гамбурга) с докладом «Individual code-switching strategies in language shift: The case of Nanai and Ulcha».
Аннотация доступна ниже в английской версии объявления.
The Research Group on Contact of Russian with Indigenous Languages of Russia has restarted its open seminar series on language contact.
The talk given by Natalya Stoynova (researcher at the University of Hamburg) took place on 9 February 2026. The title is “Individual code-switching strategies in language shift: The case of Nanai and Ulcha”.
Abstract
Structural types of code-switching in language shift are claimed to differ from those in balanced bilinguals. Myers-Scotton (2000: 104–105) postulates a special type of “composite” code-switching, which can break the rules formulated for the “classical” code-switching. Some predictions on code-switching in language shift were made in terms of structural types of code-switching distinguished by Muysken (2000), i.e. insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization. A shift from predominant insertion in early stages of language shift to alternation in progressed stages is reported in some papers, see Aalberse et al. (2019: 67–86). Lipski (2014) associates language shift rather with congruent lexicalization.
The study is based on field texts recorded from modern speakers of Nanai and Ulcha, two closely-related endangered Tungusic languages, spoken in the Amur region. Their speakers are fluent in Nanai/Ulcha, but nowadays use mostly Russian in their everyday communication. The texts were produced in Nanai/Ulcha under a special instruction “to tell a story in the native language and not in Russian”. However, the number of Russian fragments in the collection is high (ca. 19% of tokens are in Russian). There is no unified specific structural strategy of code-switching characteristic of the whole collection: instead, a variation across speakers is observed. In the talk, I assess this variation quantitatively, using Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components.
The speakers group into three clusters. ‘Inserters’ (mainly younger speakers) use code-switching more actively, the insertion strategy (e.g., Russian NP’s) is predominant. In the speech of ‘non-switchers’ (mainly older speakers), code-switching is structurally diverse and relatively rare. The most interesting cluster is that of ‘non-standard switchers’, who actively use non-constituent and other structurally non-trivial code-switches. Differences from what was previously reported for code-switching in language shift (more insertions in younger speakers, non-trivial code-switches in ‘non-standard switchers’) can be explained taking into account that here one deals not with spontaneous code-switching, but with a specific mode of ‘speaking a weaker language under a special instruction’.
References
Aalberse, Suzanne, Ad Backus, and Pieter Muysken. 2019. Heritage Languages. A language contact Approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lipski, John M. 2014. Spanish-English code-switching among low-fluency bilinguals: Towards an expanded typology // Sociolinguistic studies, 8(1). P. 23–55. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v8i1.23
Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. 2002. Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press.