LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI XXXVI (1996)

LIETUVIŲ KALBA: TYRĖJAI IR TYRIMAI

Laima GRUMADIENĖ

A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECT OF RESEARCH INTO CONTEMPORARY SPOKEN LITHUANIAN

1. The new “Program for the Study of Lithuanian Dialects and Their Interaction.” Dialectologists from the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Vilnius University prepared the “Program for the Study of Lithuanian Dialects and Their Interaction” (hereafter, the “Program”), whose aim is “to study, from various perspectives, the speech of people throughout Lithuania and the linguistic situation of individual regions, to reveal tendencies in dialect development, their interaction, and their relations with other—neighboring—languages or their dialects” (from the preface to the “Program”).

The idea of such a program, or something similar, had been discussed for a whole decade (at the Republican Seminar of Young Linguists, at dialectologists’ seminars organized by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, and at international conferences in Vilnius, Warsaw, Minsk, and elsewhere; see Grumadienė, Stundžia 1990a; 1990b). The project and the program themselves, as well as the composition of the working group and its leadership, changed; V. Čekmonas and B. Stundžia left the group. Although no unified conception was adopted, a five-part questionnaire was prepared: “Sociolinguistics” (V. Čekmonas and L. Grumadienė), “Phonetics” (L. Grumadienė), “Accentuation” (D. Mikulėnienė and B. Stundžia), “Morphology” (D. Mikulėnienė and K. Morkūnas), and “Lexicon” (A. Vidugiris); K. Morkūnas supervised the work as it was prepared for publication. Two parts of the “Program” have already been published (Lietuvių...: 1995a; 1995b). The “Program” contains a great many questions (over 2,000), so the answers will not only “supplement the dialectological collections already assembled and still being compiled, and be used both for linguistic-geographical and monographic studies” (from the preface to the “Program”), but will also make it possible to answer other kinds of questions that arise in the study of contemporary spoken Lithuanian. The principle for selecting questions for the “Program” was to provide as comprehensive a range of possible questions as possible; therefore, questions may also be selected for each individual study, since some questions are relevant to certain varieties of language and others to different ones. This is particularly true of the “Phonetics” and “Morphology” sections: they contain the vast majority of questions concerning the various subsystems of Lithuanian (dialects or their varieties), so it is self-evident that some questions cannot be relevant to every dialect. For precisely this reason, the questions in the “Phonetics” section are divided into primary and supplementary ones: the supplementary questions need be considered only when the answers to the primary questions reflect the dialect’s specific features, indicate that a particular phenomenon is changing, or show variation. The “Phonetics” section is closely linked to “Morphology,” since the questions in the former are also morphological in nature; that is, the position of a sound

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is specified not only by phonetic features (whether it occurs in a stressed syllable or not, and whether it is at the beginning, middle, or end of a word), but also by morphological ones (the part of speech, case, tense, and so on). This is done for convenience in compiling data (there is no need to find out how that particular word is pronounced—it is enough to know how words of a similar type are pronounced) and in view of the possibility of processing the data by computer. Questions in both the “Phonetics” and “Morphology” sections are well suited to repeat studies of dialects investigated earlier, since comparisons can be made. The questions in the “Accentuation” and “Lexicon” sections were selected according to a somewhat different principle: the aim is to obtain answers to questions that have been little studied, questions that received somewhat less attention in earlier dialectological programs. However, these sections also include numerous questions from earlier questionnaires, so comparisons are also possible, though not as systematically as from the phonetic or morphological perspective. The “Sociolinguistics” section is entirely new and is devoted primarily to studying the interaction of Lithuanian dialects with other languages. It also contains a separate subsection, “Informant Profile,” which, in the authors’ view, is relevant to all dialectological studies under contemporary conditions, when so many changes are taking place in the lives of traditional dialect speakers, and also anticipates computer processing of the data.

In this article, I would like to draw attention to the opportunity created by the “Program” to investigate not only the traditional subject matter of Lithuanian dialectology—the speech of elderly rural people—but also less familiar yet equally important subjects: the adaptation of dialect speakers to the standard language or to some interdialect, the emergence of regional interdialects, urban speech, and other similar language varieties, among other things. The following words of A. Pupkis (1980: 56) remain relevant: “... dialectal features enter the standard language chiefly from the semi-dialectal speech of those speakers who have greater influence on the standard language: writers, editors, authors of various written texts, and the like. To date, no one in Lithuanian linguistics has attempted to determine how these dialectal features enter, or which speakers of semi-dialectal language exert greater influence on the standard language in this respect. This question is very important for language cultivation: since dialects remain an important source for developing our standard language, studying the path taken by dialectal features into the standard language would make it easier to regulate dialectal forms themselves and enable schools to teach the standard language more successfully.”

2. The structure of contemporary spoken Lithuanian. For the first time in Lithuanian linguistics, contemporary spoken Lithuanian and its sources of enrichment—dialects, argot, slang, and other languages—are discussed in the aforementioned book by A. Pupkis. Here, spoken language is divided into standard spoken language, used officially and publicly—in the theater, on the radio and television, at school, and at meetings—and informal, private speech, used, for example, within the family, among coworkers, or when talking with acquaintances (1980: 58). Later, there were other attempts to discuss semi-dialectal speech (Grumadienė 1992; 1993a). When attempting to divide language into dialects, subdialects, or standard public speech, it is useful to take account of speech communities—groups of people united by the use of the same or a similar language variety and by recognition of the same language norms. Incidentally, the speech community is a fundamental concept in sociolinguistics. On closer examination

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it becomes clear that only dialect speakers could be associated with a speech community living in a particular territory, but this would mean “ignoring” the speech of a sizable group of people living there (newcomers, or local residents with substantial education, and so on), since a defining feature of a community is the same or a very similar linguistic system. Moreover, the same person may belong to several speech communities. Therefore, speech communities are increasingly described not only in terms of a shared territory, but also by social or demographic characteristics: age, education, occupation, social status, or other factors. The questions in the “Informant Profile” are designed precisely to describe these characteristics.

If we were to take a look at the speech of the residents of any small Lithuanian town, we would certainly find people speaking a relatively pure dialect; we would also find people speaking almost dialectally, but no longer using (consistently or sporadically) the primary, most important, and therefore most salient features of the dialect; people speaking almost standard language, but with a distinctive dialectal accent, sometimes inserting dialect words or expressions; and people who no longer speak dialectally under any circumstances, even though they may have known the dialect in childhood. All this linguistic expression, seemingly disorderly at first glance, reflects processes whose direction and strength can be determined by applying sociolinguistic and purely linguistic methods.

Such processes take place both through the interaction of components at different linguistic levels and as elements of one or another language system or subsystem alternate in the course of speech. According to Gumperz (1982: 66), people who find themselves in a situation where they are compelled to try to use a language variety that is not their own, but is nevertheless very similar, constantly select and combine the rules of two linguistic systems or subsystems. This also happens in the Lithuanian linguistic environment—even in the most remote village, when interviewing an elderly informant who tries to adapt to the listener’s “educated” speech and appear more learned, not to mention younger or educated informants (cf. Chambers 1992).

An attempt to examine more systematically the speech of so-called “spoiled” dialect speakers, who speak semi-dialectally, revealed that this is an extraordinarily broad spectrum of forms. On the other hand, the speech of those who speak “impure” standard language varies greatly. Therefore, it is hardly possible to distinguish systematically any subdialects or other rather vaguely defined language varieties in contemporary spoken Lithuanian. I believe it would be worthwhile to discuss four separate linguistic phenomena: traditional dialects, regional interdialects, the speech of Lithuania’s major cities, and the normative standard language.

I have called traditional dialects a linguistic phenomenon in such stark terms because, in their pure form, traditional dialects scarcely exist anymore: however dialectally they may speak, dialect speakers increasingly incorporate elements from other linguistic systems or subsystems, most often from the standard language. For example, Eastern Aukštaitians, while using un, in quite consistently where the standard language has an, en, may suddenly say supranta, kanda instead of the expected suprunta, kunda, or the like. But there are also processes in the opposite direction: during a 1995 expedition to Vištytis (Vilkaviškis district), we observed that young people use more specific Western Aukštaitian gender forms than older people, and seem to speak “more dialectally.” J. Pabrėža and I. Remenytė have observed similar phenomena in the Samogitian dialect. It is becoming clear that

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The focus is on the norms of certain regional interdialects, for example those of Marijampolė, Mažeikiai, Panevėžys, Utena, Alytus, or other areas. Such regional interdialects result from interaction between the surrounding dialects and the standard language; although heterogeneous, they have a system of norms of their own.

The major cities of Lithuania—Klaipėda, Šiauliai and, of course, Kaunas and Vilnius—have their own linguistic character. The norms of language used in them differ not only from one another, but also from the standard language and regional interdialects, although they are strongly influenced by both of the latter.

The normative standard language is a kind of construct, an abstraction; it is unclear whether it exists at all in a pure form (Grumadienė 1993b). (How much of this language can be heard on the radio and television?).

3. Processes occurring as language changes. Lithuanian dialects have so far been studied only to a limited extent using methods other than linguistic geography. Without denying the suitability of this method, it is worth considering how the recent experience of dialectologists and sociolinguists worldwide might be applied to the study of the present-day situation of the Lithuanian language, since processes similar to those occurring in other countries are also emerging in Lithuania (cf. Walters 1994). Without suggesting that traditional dialectology should turn into sociolinguistics, attention is nevertheless drawn to some advantages of sociolinguistic research in explaining the fate and use of language in the dynamic modern world.

P. Trudgillas (1986), tyręs anglų kalbos tarnių tarpusavio ir norminės bendrinės kalbos sąveiką, mano, kad yra tirtinas vadinamasis koineizacijos ar koinė radimosi procesas — tai esąs naujų kalbos atmainų formavimasis sąveikaujant skirtingoms tos pačios kalbos atmainoms, o jo priežastis — vidinė šalies gyventojų migracija. Tiesa, koinė suprantama gana įvairiai (Siegel 1987: 186—187): vieni koinė radimąsi sieja su tarmės ar tarmių virtimu bendrine šnekamąja ar standartine kalba; kiti — su regioninių lingua franca formavimusi, atsirandančiu sąveikaujant tarmėms, bet pastarosioms savųjų funkcijų neprarandant; tretiems būtina koinė radimosi sąlyga atrodo esanti migracija — tarmių atstovams pakeitus gyvenamąją vietą ir aplinką, neišvengiamai kinta ir jų kalba — įgauna koinė bruožų ar tiesiog virsta koinė. Taigi koinė radimasis vienaip ar kitaip siejamas su miestų kalbos formavimusi. Minėtais atvejais sąveikauja vienos kalbos tarmės ar kitokios jos atmainos, kurios iš principo yra suprantamos vienos kitoms. Todėl, matyt, visose kalbose koinė radimasis turi bendrų bruožų (Kerswill 1994: 4): pradiniam etapui būdingas didelis įvairavimas individualiuoju lygmeniu pritaikant savo kalbą prie aplinkinių kalbos, sunkokai paaiškinamas diskurso ar socialinių veiksnių įtaka — kartais susidaro įspūdis, kad tokie žmonės tiesiog painioja dviejų kalbos atmainų normas. Vėlesnio koineizacijos etapo kalboje aptinkama paprastinimo reiškinių fonetikos, fonologijos ar morfologijos lygmenimis, susikuriama ”tarpinių kalbos formų”, nesančių nė vienoje iš sąveikaujančių kalbos atmainų (pavyzdžiui, trumpųjų kirčiuotų žodžio galo balsių ilginimas Vilniaus miesto kalboje).

Sometimes the theory of koine formation is identified with the theory of substratum interference (Thomason, Kaufman 1988: 37; Appel, Muysken 1987: 157): when a

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community of speakers using a particular language variety is augmented by a large group of newcomers, the latter adapting their language only in part, and that adapted language in turn sometimes beginning to affect the language of local people as well (Harris 1991: 191—212). It is precisely this kind of process that might be sought in the speech of the cities of Kaunas and Šiauliai, which have been significantly affected by migrants from surrounding dialect areas. P. Kerswill’s (1994) study of the interaction between a Norwegian dialect and urban speech once again confirmed that dialect change should be viewed as a process driven by, and dependent on, population migration. In such a case, the sociolinguistic aspect of dialect research should be emphasized: language change is governed by internal linguistic regularities, but is triggered by social factors. Studies by scholars in various countries show that, to understand the mechanism of dialect change, the speech of individuals must be studied, since everyone changes their speech individually, though there are also commonalities (Bortoni—Ricardo 1985). Particular attention should be paid to the need for information not only about informants’ age, education, occupation, gender, and so on, but also about their life histories—where and when, and under what circumstances, conditions may have arisen that compelled them to change their usual speech norms (a change of residence or type of work, the attitudes of those around them, and so on). This latter consideration makes it imperative to study all interacting language varieties at the same time; thus, an individual’s speech must be studied in its social context. Such a context is the speech community. The Lithuanian linguistic landscape contains various kinds of speech communities, which can direct language change in one direction or another.

When studying the speech of elderly rural people, the concept of style is not important; this cannot, however, be said of the speech of younger people, especially the educated, so possible style-shifting in response to the conversation situation, the relationship between interlocutors, and other factors would also have to be taken into account (Dressler, Wodak 1982).

Kalbos bendrijose esama kodų perjunginėjimo apraiškų (Dorian 1982): kai į sakinį ar pasakymą įterpiama kitos sistemos (nebūtinai kitos kalbos) ar posistemės lyčių. Šis reiškinys dažniausiai būna susijęs su pokalbio tema ir pašnekovų socialiniais vaidmenimis: šnekėdami apie vietos gyvenimo aktualijas, pateikėjai vartoja daugiau vietos kalbai būdingų lyčių, o ėmę kalbėti apie tolimus, nekasdieni(us) dalykus, keičia arba kaitalioja ir kalbos pobūdį — vartoja daugiau bendrinės kalbos ar panašios į ją lyčių. Pavyzdžiui, net ir pateikdami tautosaką, dainą ar pasaką, tarmės atstovai neretai stengiasi prikaišioti kaip galima daugiau bendrinės kalbos formų, nes jaučiasi atlieką tą kūrinį viešai, tarsi scenoje. Čia pat, atokvėpio minutėmis, bendrinės kalbos lyčių paprastai pasitaiko daug mažiau, nes kalbai nebeskiriama tiek dėmesio, ne ji tampa svarbiausia.

Peripheral dialects and those bordering areas where other languages are spoken also exhibit manifestations of pidginization (Mühlhäusler 1986)—the merging of two languages. This is a phenomenon of an entirely different nature, in which conscious influence on language is very slight. For example, some degree of pidginization can be discerned in the speech of speakers of these peripheral dialects who begin to inflect many words from both their native language and another language, which they know well and use frequently, according to the same pattern: nouns in both languages take the grammatical gender they have in the system of the interacting language that occupies the stronger position, and so on. All this can

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to study not only as scattered linguistic facts, but also to seek the reasons for their emergence and the patterns governing their use.

Borrowings should not be overlooked. These are words or idioms from another language, usually adapted externally to the system of one’s own language, whose use is greatly influenced not only by linguistically conditioned circumstances but also by the conversational situation, topic, and interlocutor’s status. Although borrowing may at first glance sometimes resemble code-switching, the two should not be conflated. To date, Lithuanian linguistics has been dominated by a negative attitude toward recording borrowings in dialects—as evidenced by the academic dictionary of the Lithuanian language: very few borrowings are included, but this also means that it remains unclear how certain concepts or phenomena and actions are actually named in dialects. The Lithuanian language does not thereby become either purer or more contaminated; it is simply presented with less information. It would probably be worth filling this gap now, at least, but it is essential to take account of genuine borrowings (the only words in use, with no substitutes) as well as words from other languages or from another variety of the same language that emerge in the process of code-switching—occasionalisms.

It would certainly be interesting to answer the question raised by W. Labov: why do structural changes take place in this particular language and at this particular time, rather than in other structurally similar languages, or in the same language but at a different time (Weinreich, Labov, Herzog 1968)? J. Milroy (1992: 24) therefore emphasizes that it is essential to investigate the causes and circumstances under which language processes are actualized—something that, he argues, cannot be done without taking account of language users themselves and their life histories. What prompts speakers to reduce or even eliminate differences between their own speech and that of those around them, that is, to actualize language change?

P. Trudgillas (1986: 98—102) yra pastebėjęs, kad besistengiantys pritaikyti savo kalbą prie kitos kalbos atmainos arba vengia kai kurių ryškių skirtumų, tiesiog „apeina aštrius kampus”, arba atsisako jų laipsniškai — iš pradžių ryškesnių, vėliau vis mažiau tekrintančių į akis. Tai viena iš pagrindinių koineizacijos ypatybių. Tyrinėtojų nuolat pabrėžiama subjektyvaus vertinimo, nuostatų, vertybių skalės reikšmė: kas aplinkinių pašiepama ar net smerkiama, to pirmiausia siekiama atsikratyti (Giles, Taylor, Bourhis 1973).

Speakers first try to eliminate salient features of their own speech—distinctive phonological oppositions or phonetic contrasts (Trudgill 1986: 11—38). Therefore, interaction between Lithuanian dialects, or between dialects and the standard language, should first be described from this perspective, using the questions in the “Phonetics” and “Stress” sections. In each individual case, it would be worth identifying the salient dialect features on the basis of traditional dialect descriptions and focusing on these first. The “Phonetics” questionnaire distinguishes between “main” and “secondary, supplementary” questions: if a “main” question is not relevant to a particular study, there is no need to investigate the “supplementary” ones in greater detail either. This would constitute a staged study of change in a dialect or another language variety. A staged process is particularly characteristic of koine formation.

Phenomena at the morphological level (stem change, paradigm leveling, the disappearance or replacement of athematic verb forms or of the endings of certain nominal cases, and so on) are manifestations of language simplification.

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Such phenomena also occur during koine formation, but these manifestations of what is essentially language impoverishment are characteristic of pidginization. However, interaction between language varieties does not necessarily lead to simplification or even impoverishment; more complex grammatical or semantic forms may also emerge, particularly in word formation and at the lexical level. The use of certain language elements as alternatives depends on speaking style: they occur in speech in some cases, but not in others.

4. The sociolinguistic method of language research. The questions in the “Sociolinguistics” section of the aforementioned “Program” are formulated to obtain answers about the possible influence of social or demographic factors on language use. Language could be studied sociolinguistically using parameters such as the social status of the informant’s parents, the informant’s own occupation, age, sex, education, the place (or places) where that education was received, the languages studied, when and where the informant left or arrived, and how many years they spent abroad. These are what would be called objective social and demographic data.

The “Program” contains questions that could also elicit so-called subjective data—revealing the attitudes, evaluations, and orientations of the informants themselves and people in their surroundings (Trudgill 1972). For example, one might ask which language (or language variety) they consider the most beautiful, or which one is most comfortable for praying, chanting, singing, and so on. This is how language prestige and reference language norms are identified. As early as 1972, W. Labov pointed out that people openly declare certain language norms to be prestigious (usually codified or otherwise generally accepted), but in reality, somewhat privately, or without being fully aware of it themselves, they “profess” others—norms that few publicly declare prestigious, but which have become regulating norms because they are markers of membership in a particular speech community (Labov 1972: 249).

The questions in the “Program” also make it possible to establish the attitudes of those around the informant toward a particular language or language variety (that of a priest, members of affluent social strata, or the like), and thus to determine whether there is a degree of social pressure to change one’s speech or, conversely, to preserve it as unchanged as possible. P. Kerswill (1994: 52) notes that speakers who are prouder of their dialect remain more loyal to it even after moving elsewhere. Sometimes this behavior also depends on a family’s social status: children from affluent families are more self-confident and do not try to conceal their origins. This observation is relevant in Lithuania as well, and there may be another explanation for this phenomenon: after all, Samogitians are more often proud of their speech than Aukštaitians, especially those from the east.

Sociolinguistic research requires the study of specific linguistic facts as well. It would therefore be worthwhile to discuss how answers to questions in the “Program” sections other than “Sociolinguistics” can be elicited. The traditional method used by dialectologists is for several people to divide up several dozen or several hundred questionnaire questions among themselves and ask local people from the same area—usually elderly residents. It is not necessary to collect all the answers from a single informant. This is the method of linguistic geography, which can be used to determine whether the linguistic feature under study exists in the speech of the people being studied; variation need not then be considered, or need only be considered to a very limited extent, except perhaps to note it in the comments. “Not such” answers

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… are excluded because the focus is on dominant genders and the dominant phenomenon is being investigated. Once interest turns to language variation, this methodology is no longer suitable. Not to mention that it is necessary to study an individual’s speech and thus answer the questions in the “Sociolinguistics” section: one must decide which phenomena will be examined more systematically, since collecting responses to all the questions in the “Program” from a single informant would take an extremely long time and would be a task that is difficult to accomplish. It is therefore necessary to select several (a dozen, or, if desired, several dozen) linguistic phenomena whose usage varies in marked ways or which are considered important for other reasons; for example, one might study the pronunciation of stressed ie, uo among Northern Samogitians, or the forms of the masculine singular dative of nouns among Southern Aukštaitians, and so on. The totality of variation in the use of such phenomena would constitute sociolinguistic variables; that is, representing a phenomenon might sometimes require an entire scale of variants, most importantly, ones associated with sociolinguistic parameters such as age, gender, speaking circumstances, and so forth. The data obtained can be processed using quantitative or other methods, depending on the need. (For more on sociolinguistic variables, see Walters 1994: 65–66).

5. Instead of conclusions. These remarks were intended to draw attention to the new “Program for the Study of Lithuanian Dialects and Their Interaction” and the opportunities it provides to study essentially any variety of contemporary spoken Lithuanian, not only “pure” dialects. An attempt is made to present some of the latest studies of dialect interaction in other languages, particularly the research principles discussed in them. The main principle of the proposed sociolinguistic study of language is to investigate an individual’s speech in the context of their environment, learning as much as possible about the environment’s potential influence on the individual’s conscious or unconscious alteration of their speech. The essence of the sociolinguistic research method is to identify patterns in the linguistic behavior of individuals connected in certain respects and to determine the main factors governing it, thereby establishing the characteristics and directions of change of the language functioning within a speech community.

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Grumadienė L. 1993ᵇ: Sociolingvistinis požiūris į dabartinės bendrinės lietuvių kalbos tarties normas. — Aktualūs bendrinės tarties klausimai. Valst. lietuvių kalbos komisijos organizuoto seminaro (1993 12 13) tezės. Vilnius. 6.

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SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECT IN INVESTIGATING THE CONTEMPORARY SPOKEN LITHUANIAN

Summary

The new ”Program of the investigation of the Lithuanian dialects and dialect contact” is compiled by the Lithuanian dialectologists (ed. K. Morkūnas). Aim of this article is to emphasize the usefulness of the sociolinguistic method in studying contemporary dialects. A lot of dialect contact studies in other countries is reviewed. The author’s conception of the contemporary spoken Lithuanian is presented. The processes of koineization, substratum interference, borrowing, code-switching, style-shifting, etc. are discussed. Centering on individual’s speech in its social context is resumed as the main sociolinguistic principle of the dialect contact investigation.

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