Morphophonological Innovations in New Speakers’ Kashubian
From Firenze University Press Journal: Studi Slavistici
Maciej Bandur, Intitute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
Robert Borges, Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
In multilingual contexts, it is possible to observe many instances of the way in which the features associated with one language influence those of another. Perhaps one of the most obvious and well-known types of influence, the ‘foreign accent’, is related to incongruent mapping of phonological space among the languages involved. In some ways, such a foreign accent may not affect grammar beyond the level of an idiosyncratic sound system, however, when a language relies on the full extent of its sound system in morphological par-adigms, mismapped target sounds can have real consequences for grammar. Further, when the social context is unbalanced and there are many multilingual speakers, the situation is conducive to conventionalization of innovative idiolects at a wider speech-community level. This paper presents one such context, namely Kashubian, which is a West-Slavic language, spoken by a(n ethnic) minority in a discontiguous area in north-central Poland. Due to differential developments in both Polish and Kashubian related to the loss of phonemic vow-el length, the two languages divide vocalic space differently. While there has been long stand-ing normative multilingualism in Kashubia, following the Second World War, Kashubian, as virtually all minority languages spoken in Poland, was subject to the communist government policies that were designed to homogenise the population, and led to a drastic reduction of intergenerational transmission (Majewicz, Wicherkiewicz 1998). Despite the fact that Kashubian became recognized as a regional language within the Republic of Poland in 2005 (Dembinska 2012), and since has received monetary support from Poland and the European Union to establish large-scale language education programs, speaker numbers have steadily decreased in the last decades and the language can be considered vulnerable or threatened (Campbell et al. 2022; Hammarström et al. 2022).
Underlying this general trend, Kashubian activism, which predates The War and per-sisted to the extent that it was tolerated under communism, continues to attract young people with whom Kashubian regional identity resonates. One effect of this is that many, particularly young, people choose to learn Kashubian and incorporate it into parts of their daily life as an outward symbol of their identity, despite the fact that the language may not have been the primary language of socialization or present in any significant way. While these ‘New Speakers’ are essentially l2 learners of Kashubian2, they are typically deeply engaged in speech-community life, as activists, journalists, authors, language teachers, etc (O’Rourke, Pujolar and Ramallo 2015). This, and the above-mentioned fact that the Kashubian language is already quite vulnerable due to the sociolinguistic setting, means that New Speakers’ idiolects have a greater potential to exert influence at a speech-commu-nity level than, for example learners of English or French would have on those language. Most studies dealing with New Speakers tend to focus on sociological themes, e.g. identity, authenticity, power relations, but our focus is specifically on language use by New Speakers and insights New Speakers’ use can provide in relation to Language evolution in general. Makurat (2014) is the only major source that accounts of Kashubian-Polish language con-tact, presenting bidirectional effects of Kashubian-Polish multilingualism at a synchronic level. It covers effects of multilingualism in Kashubian context, and addresses phonetics, phonolog y, and morphosyntax. However, we are not aware of any studies that present an analysis of language use among Kashubian New Speakers.Our point of departure is that due to this scenario, we will be able to observe acceler-ated processes of language change by studying language use of Kashubian New Speakers, thus shedding light on relevant questions in the fields of contact linguistics and historical linguistics, namely: How does feature variation condition language change? How are the processes of language acquisition related to those of change? We begin the investigation, specifically with a discussion of differential development of Kashubian and Polish Vowel inventories. We then discuss the reliance of Kashubian morpholog y on its vowel inven-tory for paradigmatic integrity and compare those structures with corresponding Polish grammar. We then turn to language use of Kashubian New Speakers; we first present our methodological approach for data collection, analytical framework for interpreting data, and then a presentation of our findings.Our analysis has shown that New Speakers’ Kashubian is significantly different from other spoken Kashubian varieties described up-to-date. We have observed a strong tendency to repattern verbal and nominal paradigms through paradigm levelling and vowel substitution. Moreover, there is a strong tendency to align the Kashubian vowel inventory with Polish, which has profound consequences for the Kashubian morphophonological system.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Studi_Slavis-14897
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/ss/article/view/14897
