Intensive contact and the copying of paradigms – an Ėven dialect in contact with Sakha (Yakut)

• Main Author: Pakendorf, Brigitte
• Other Authors: Dynamique Du Langage (DDL), Université Lumière - Lyon 2 (UL2)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2009
• Subjects: Even; Tungusic; Turkic; borrowing; morphology; [SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics; Sakha; aleut; Copper Island Aleut; Yakut; Siberia
• Online Access: https://hal.univ-lyon2.fr/hal-02006813; https://hal.univ-lyon2.fr/hal-02006813/document; https://hal.univ-lyon2.fr/hal-02006813/file/Pakendorf_2009_Paradigm_copying_JLC.pdf

International audience The development of the unique structure of Copper Island Aleut, which displays a combination of Russian finite verb morphology and Aleut nominal and non-finite verbal morphology as well as lexicon has been the subject of heated debate. In the absence of other examples of similar inflectional paradigm copying, the processes leading to this development are hard to elucidate. This paper discusses examples of paradigms copied from the Siberian Turkic language Sakha (Yakut) into a dialect of the Northern Tungusic language Ėven spoken in the village of Sebjan-Küöl in northeastern Siberia. These data demonstrate that paradigm copying can take place in a situation of widespread bilingualism, with code-switching playing a vital role. Furthermore, they provide evidence that such mixed forms have the potential of serving as conduits for further copying of grammatical forms, and that they play an important role in the linguistic identity of the speakers, as has been suggested previously for mixed languages such as Copper Island Aleut.