TALK: N. M. Stoynova / code-switching in Nanai and Ulcha (09.02.2026, 12:00, online)

[Egor Kashkin]

Дорогие коллеги,

В ИРЯ РАН возобновляет работу открытый семинар по языковым контактам,
проводимый на базе Группы по изучению контактного взаимодействия
русского языка с языками коренных народов России.

На ближайшем заседании, в понедельник 9 февраля 2026 года в 12:00,
выступит 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».

Семинар пройдет онлайн. За получением ссылки следует обращаться к
Егору Владимировичу Кашкину (egork...@gmail.com).

Аннотация доклада

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.