A Study of the Russian Language spoken in Central Asia as a Lingua franca

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370458
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: YANAGIDA Kenji 東北大学, 東北アジア研究センター, 准教授 (90241562)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: ロシア語 / 言語接触 / 中央アジア / ウズベキスタン

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Russian-speaking people of European origins are decreasing in number in Uzbekistan because of economic difficulties, but children of such people go to Russian-speaking schools and speak only Russian just as in the Soviet era. We noticed that the younger a Russian monolingual is, the closer his Russian is to the Russian lingua franca which Central Asian bilinguals speak with accent and original syntactic rules that we can never find in European languages. It is easy to explain this fact: Russian monolingual children now chat at school much more with their friends of Central Asian nations than with Russians. Thus, we can conclude that language contacts affect even the language of monolinguals and their mother tongue assimilates to the lingua franca spoken by local peoples. Elements of the local languages affect the former “dominant” language through this process, which makes them similar both phonetically and grammatically.

Free Research Field

ロシア語学