Nina Dobrushina - Effects of language contact in oral corpora

Russian is used as a lingua franca across a vast territory where many minority languages are spoken. Depending on the region and the age of the speaker, among other factors, Russian may be used as a second language with varying degrees of fluency, or as the first language of a bilingual speaker also speaking a heritage ancestral language. In both cases, influence of the ancestral language may be evident at the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax or lexicon. Oral corpora of bilingual Russian serve as a major source of linguistic data on these phenomena. In this talk, I will discuss the creation of such corpora and present examples from several studies, including code-switching between Russian and Sakha word order in noun phrases and preposition dropping in Russian spoken in Daghestan.