DALIA PAKALNIŠKIENĖ

Klaipėda University

Research areas: Baltic studies, geolinguistics, history of the verb.

Danguolė Mikulėnienė, Asta Leskauskaitė, Vilija Ragaišienė, Laura Geržotaitė, Nijolė Birgelienė

CHANGE IN LITHUANIAN DIALECTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY: THE LITHUANIAN SPEECH VARIETIES OF POLAND

COLLECTIVE MONOGRAPH

Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2016, 503 p.

ISBN 978-609-411-186-0

The cover, in soft colours and featuring an autumn landscape, and the title Change in Lithuanian Dialects at the Beginning of the 21st Century: The Lithuanian Speech Varieties of Poland are this monograph’s “calling card”—they point to another language in the fieldwork location, autumn.

A group of Lithuanian and Polish linguists came together for a long-awaited undertaking—a systematic description of the speech varieties of Poland. Political, economic, and social changes are rapidly transforming the linguistic view of the world, so it is important to document languages and dialects as quickly as possible, especially the linguistic situation in border areas. Drawing on facts about the Lithuanian speech varieties of Poland collected over several decades and their interpretations, various audio, video, and manuscript archives, and data from field expeditions they themselves conducted in 2014–2016, the authors undertook a multifaceted study of these speech varieties—from sociolinguistic analysis and the identification of linguistic archaisms and innovations to discussion of the varieties’ development and its prognoses.

The monograph’s concise and informative introduction presents readers with the research object, aims and tasks, research material, methods, relevance, and significance. The researchers decided to combine modern and traditional methods of dialectology. For the first time, they applied to the speech varieties under study a multidimensional model for investigating prognostic parameters, according to which: “1) predicted by means of a titos selection method

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linguistic features of the dialects; 2) the linguistic environment was analyzed; 3) the assessment of the local language (and languages) was summarized from the perspective of the respondents under study” (p. 20). The dialect material was collected using questionnaire surveys and interviews, and analyzed using innovative methods of geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and perceptual dialectology—“computer mapping, mental maps, sociolinguistic variables, statistical analysis, etc.” (p. 20). The linguistic system and development of the dialects are described using traditional methods of Lithuanian linguistics: descriptive, historical-comparative, formalization, and others.

The first chapter, divided into two parts, “The Preconditions for the Emergence, Spread, and Development of the Lithuanian Dialects of Poland: The Sociohistorical, Sociocultural, and Demographic Context,” presents a broad overview of the historical, political, economic, sociocultural, and demographic landscape of the study area. The first part, “Historical Contexts of the Lithuanian Dialects of Poland,” briefly surveys the oldest history of this region, from the time of the Yotvingians to the end of the 20th century. The second section, “Sociocultural and Demographic Structural Parameters and Their Dynamics in the Lithuanian Communities of the Punskas and Seinai Areas,” provides a detailed analysis of the sociogeographical situation at the beginning of the 21st century: population figures in 2001 and 2015; the number of Lithuanians in 2002 and 2011; sex, age, and educational parameters; educational institutions; employment; and village infrastructure. The chapter is richly illustrated with informative tables, maps, and photographs.

The second chapter, “The Lithuanian Dialects of Poland and Their Boundaries,” outlines the development of the inventory of Lithuanian dialects in Poland, beginning with the first expeditions of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the mid-19th century. It analyzes the results of expeditions and the first studies by servants, as well as interpretations of voicing (discussing the research of Frydrichas Kuršaitis, Antanas Baranauskas, Antanas Salys, and Eduardas Volteris), and considers relics of the Yotvingian substrate (indeed, the interpretation of the Yotvingian consonants s, z should be regarded as lapsus calami, p. 71). The very detailed third section, “The Boundaries of the Lithuanian Dialects of Poland from a Geolinguistic Perspective,” examines in turn the boundaries of the Lithuanian dialects, from the earliest records onward; maps areas representing different chronological layers; compares and verifies conflicting data; and presents the demographic situation identified during the latest expedition, conducted in 2014–2016—geographical features of the areas where Lithuanian is thriving and where it is disappearing. This section would fit naturally in the second part of the first chapter, but the authors evidently had reasons for presenting it separately.

The third chapter, “Variation and Change in the Features of the Lithuanian Dialects of Poland,” the largest chapter (175 pp.), is devoted to linguistic analysis of the dialects. The chapter title emphasizes the methodological principle of not merely recording phonetic and morphological features, but also showing their variants and tracing their development. The section “Characteristic Phonetic Features” presents the most salient features of vocalism and consonantism, documented in two Lithuanian dialects of Poland—the Southwestern Aukštaitian and Western Southern Aukštaitian dialects.

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Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI

Dangolė Mikulėnienė, Asta Leskauskaitė, Vilija Ragažienė, Laura Geržotaitė, Nijolė Birgelienė. Lietuvių tarmių kaita XXI a. pradžioje: Lenkijos lietuvių šnektos

Southwestern Aukštaitian and Western Southern Aukštaitian. Expedition data allow us to refine the account of the long–short vowel opposition retained in the Southwestern Aukštaitian area: only the mixed diphthongs an, am, en, em and the old long vowels ę, į remain; a is pronounced instead of e at the beginning of a word; consonants are hardened; and s, z and š, ž are occasionally affricated, and so on. Western Southern Aukštaitians differ from Western Aukštaitians in the reflex of historical ę as y, į, the shortening of unstressed long vowels to half-long vowels, buzzing, and strong consonant depalatalization. The vowel systems established by other researchers—T. Bucht, Wojciech Smoczyński, Michal Hasuk, and Kazimieras Garšva—as well as the causes and interpretations of buzzing and consonant depalatalization, are critically assessed. It is noted that at the beginning of the 21st century the vocalism and consonantism of the dialects are changing intensively, and the two dialects are becoming more alike; thus, new dialectal formations, golets, are taking shape under the influence of public Lithuanian and Polish. The second subsection provides a detailed account of the history of research on the prosody of the Lithuanian dialects of Poland and examines the present-day accentuation system and its changes and causes in detail: stress, accent, accentual variants and tendencies across all stem classes of inflected words, mutual influence, and the causes of variation. The third chapter addresses the grammatical system of the Punskas and Seinai dialects according to the principles of natural morphology, which are still applied only rarely in Lithuanian linguistics. The authors have chosen to discuss, in their words, only three parts of speech—nouns, pronouns, and verbs—but these are undoubtedly the most important and problematic, and best represent the grammatical system of each language. Most attention is given to the grammatical categories of nouns and variation in their expression. The empirical material is classified in detail: nouns of Baltic and Lithuanian / non-Lithuanian origin and hybrid formation; feminine / masculine noun inflections; and data from three different time periods—2013–2016, 1988–1989, and 1971–1983—which are compared with facts from the native dialects. Stem strength and productivity are assessed, and the singular locative cases—inessive and illative—are discussed in greater detail (the adessive and allative have disappeared). Among pronouns, the most morphologically significant types are discussed: personal, participial and non-participial, specific and qualitative demonstratives. The conjugation system of the verbs in the dialects under discussion has the same structural features as in other Lithuanian dialects and the standard language. Empirical data show that infinitive forms in -tie are still in use; forms of the past frequentative with -dav- predominate alongside forms of the past definite that were formerly widely used with certain adverbs or derivatives with the suffix -(d)inėti. Athematic present-tense forms are still used, although only sporadically (the 3rd-person ending -ti is sometimes generalized to the 1st and 2nd persons as well, as in Samogitian!). Paradigms are provided for the subjunctive and imperative moods, reflexive verbs, and infinitive forms. The latter lack past definite and past frequentative forms. Structural verb types are also presented. As for the principles of the classification itself and individual examples

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could be discussed. For instance, the verb lėnda, lindo, lęs(tie) is rather inaccurately assigned to the third subgroup, which has an infix in the present tense; pūola, pūolė, pūl(tie) somehow has an infix (?) (p. 264); the characterization of subgroups eight and nine does not reflect the structure of the verbs presented—the relationship between the root vowels in the verb krána, króve, kráut(ie) is described as follows (p. 266), siūva, siūvo, siūti—the infinitive and past-tense vocalism are confused (p. 266), and so on. In my view, the classification of non-suffixed verb stems is overly fine-grained, confusing, and of unclear value. Perhaps the principles of natural morphology have been applied here a little too broadly... In the classification of suffixed verbs, it would be worth considering separating the types garsėti and varinėti; the verb dėlioti does not fit very well with the other derivatives in -oti (p. 268).

To sum up the chapter on the linguistic analysis of the dialects, whose final two sections nearly qualify as separate scholarly studies, one cannot but welcome the attention paid to changes in linguistic phenomena, variation, the causes of change, chronological and areal threats, and phenomena of interference—a fresh perspective on the dialects of the Lithuanian community in Poland.

The substantial and innovative fourth chapter, “Prerequisites for the Vitality of the Dialects of the Lithuanian Community in Poland: The Role of Communities and Speakers,” measures and predicts the vitality of the dialects under study according to three important parameters: sociocultural networks, young people’s attitudes toward dialect, and the image of the dialects of the Lithuanian community in Poland on mental maps. To identify sociocultural networks, the authors used the interview method, showing that Punsk and Sejny stand out for their strongest infrastructure, highest social prestige, and largest populations, with their gymnasiums, lyceums, other schools, kindergartens, administrative institutions, museums, cultural centers, and various organizations. Maps of sociocultural networks (figs. 41 and 42) show the directions of various connections and the openness or closedness of communities. The degree of ethnic identity is reflected in the linguistic landscape. The researchers found that public signs are most often bilingual, with one language or the other taking precedence depending on the type of establishment. Young people’s views of their native dialect were revealed by responses from students at the Punsk Lyceum and students attending universities in Lithuania and Poland, surveyed by questionnaire and interview in 2013–2015. It emerged that Lithuanian is spoken most often at home, and less often a mixture of Lithuanian and Polish. Most members of Lithuanian-speaking families speak dialectally, in the Dzūkian dialect, and not only at home—the dialect is also spoken in the solidarity or even instrumental domain. Students believe that it is worthwhile to know both varieties of the language—standard Lithuanian and the dialect—because the dialect is their native speech, the heritage of their region, and distinctive and unique. Standard Lithuanian is regarded as prestigious and essential for communicating with all Lithuanians. The third section presents mental maps revealing images of dialects, constructed according to the methodology of perceptual dialectology. The respondents, students at the Punsk March 11 Lyceum

286

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI

Danguolė Mikulėnienė, Asta Leskauskaitė, Vilija Ragaišienė, Laura Geržotaitė, Nijolė Birgelienė. Change in Lithuanian Dialects at the Beginning of the 21st Century: The Dialects of the Lithuanian Community in Poland

Students in grades 10–11 indicated dialects in various ways on their hand-drawn maps: some identified only the center of their native area, Punsk, while others marked the Dzūkian dialect, encompassing the area around Punsk in Poland and the areas around Marijampolė, Alytus, Lazdijai, or Kalvarija in Lithuania. Others distinguished the Samogitians, Western Aukštaitians, Eastern Aukštaitians, and Dzūkians, and so on. Nearly half of the respondents said that they knew two dialects—Samogitian and Aukštaitian; one-third knew three—Dzūkian, Aukštaitian, and Samogitian; and one-sixth knew four—Dzūkian, Aukštaitian, Samogitian, and Suvalkian. To students, a person who speaks dialect is associated with preserving traditions, national identity, and patriotism; such a person lives in small towns or villages and is old, and is therefore viewed stereotypically.

The fifth chapter, “The Formation of a Southern Aukštaitian Quasi-Regional Dialect in the Areas around Punsk and Sejny,” written with the passionate spirit of a researcher who asks and answers questions, summarizes the research findings and identifies a new dialect formation—a Southern Aukštaitian quasi-regional dialect taking shape on the basis of the traditional dialect spoken in the areas around Punsk and Sejny by the older generation, incorporating elements of standard Lithuanian and Polish. The salient dialect features are disappearing in the new regiolect.

The conclusions provide a substantial summary of the comprehensive study. The summaries in Polish and English will, I have no doubt, ensure the dissemination of the monograph’s ideas and raise the profile of Lithuania’s geolinguistic school. And there are also the tables, photographs, and illustrations (more than a hundred), visualizing the main findings, as well as twelve appendices on the ethnic composition of the population and language use at the end of the 19th century, and on the villages in the Punsk and Sejny dialect area that are most Lithuanian, more ethnically mixed, or Polonized, according to data from various sources—materials the scholars share with the academic community.

The lists of sources and literature once again attest to the professionalism of the study: reliable sources, dating back to the earliest records, and an extensive interdisciplinary scholarly literature—empirical research findings as well as theoretical and methodological works—enabled the scholars to produce an innovative monograph.

The labors accomplished are pleasant! (M. Tullius Cicero)

Received on 15 March 2017.

DALIA PAKALNIŠKIENĖ

Klaipėda University

5 Salomėjos Nėries St., LT-92227 Klaipėda, Lithuania

[email protected]

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