Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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to centralized top-down definition, which excluded non-standard forms. And it

allowed politically motivated manipulation: under Communism the academies

were able to provide dictionaries with authoritative definitions of evaluative ideo-

logical words like capitalist, bourgeois and Western. Dissident and e

migre

writers

like Solzhenitsyn were often officially marginalized in print before about 1990, and

so had to publish through samizda

t, the Russian term for underground publication.

As a result, their work was not able to take an official place in descriptions of the

language. Indeed, the boundary between description and prescription, as well as

proscription, was often blurred. The current partial Westernization of the Slavic

lexicons (chapter 9) is placing new responsibilities on the academies and on the

language-regulating bodies.

All living Slavic languages now have contemporary reference grammars of

substantial size and quality. Multi-volume dictionaries of the national language

have also been a feature of the larger Slavic languages: the seventeen-volume Soviet

dictionary of Russian was first published in 1957–1961. But official monolingual

dictionaries of Belarusian and Slovenian have appeared only in the last few years.

Before this the most extensive sources for Belarusian were Belarusian–Russian

bilingual dictionaries. The national official dictionaries of both Bulgarian

and Macedonian are still incomplete, and there is no official, modern monolingual

dictionary of Sorbian, though there are, significantly, several large Sorbian–

German dictionaries for both variants of Sorbian, and one substantial Upper

Sorbian–English dictionary (Stone, 2002). A similar bilingual situation currently

prevails for Bosnian (Uzicanin, 1995). The dictionaries of B/C/S have the expected

emphases toward Serbian or Croatian, together with the name of the language

(‘Serbo-Croatian’ or ‘Croato-Serbian’) and the use of either Roman or Cyrillic

script. More even-handed dictionaries have been published outside former

Yugoslavia (Benson, 1990a,b; Tolstoj, 1970), and even here there are difficul-

ties: Tolstoj, for instance, while giving only the ekavian versions of words like

B/C/S re

ka ‘river’, gives both Serb bibliote

ka and Cr knjı %zˇ n i c a for ‘library’, though

with no indication as to which word belongs to which variant of Serbo-Croatian. In

one sense this may no longer matter: with the political disintegration of Yugoslavia,

the continuation of Serbo-Croatian itself is anachronistic. However, the approach of

the Bosnian government, mirrored in Benson’s (1998) dictionary of English with

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, suggests that a parallel, pluricentric approach may

be workable, at least for Bosnian.

Reference grammars and dictionaries show official language institutions con-

secrating and consolidating the status of the national language. These institutions

can also be instruments of ethnic separatism. After 1945 a decade of solidaristic

sentiment led to the Novi Sad Agreement (Novosadski dogovor) of 1954 for

11.2 Language definition and autonomy 549

Serbo-Croatian, which validated both alphabets and both the Serbian and Croatian

norms of Serbo-Croatian (2.2.4). A prescriptive orthography (Pravopis) common to

both major variants was published in 1960. However, in 1967 a group of leading

Croatian writers and intellectuals published a ‘‘Declaration on the name of the

Croatian literary language’’. This was prompted by a mixture of nomenclature (the

label ‘‘language’’ has profound symbolic significance among the Slavs), linguistic

abstand (11.2.1), ethnic values and identity. After 1967 the Serbs became identified

both politically and linguistically with the centralist movement, and were more in

favor of Serbo-Croatian, while the Croats pressed for independent status of Croatia

and Croatian. The fragmentation of Yugoslavia has brought Serbo-Croatian to an

end as a geocultural entity, at least in its pre-1990 form.

Nationalism throughout Eastern Europe is one of the key factors which has

brought about the end of Communism (Suny, 1994). It is also helping to re-form

the language ecologies of Central and Southern Europe.

11.2.3 Purism and the culture of language

Purism has been a continuing theme in Slavic languages since the nineteenth-

century language revivals, and particularly so in the twentieth century. The larger

languages like Russian have sought to protect themselves from foreign influences –

pathologically so during the xenophobic years of the reign of Stalin. The other

languages have tried to rid themselves of both non-Slavic and non-indigenous

Slavic elements, especially in the languages of the old Austro-Hungarian empire

(Czech, Slovak, Croatian and Slovenian). Bulgarian has been operating a policy of

de-Turkification for a century, and since 1990 Ukrainian and Belarusian have

instituted a policy of de-Russification (see chapter 9).

Purism has both a positive aspect (national sentiment and pride) and a negative-

normative one (xenophobia). It is often more proscriptive than prescriptive, and

where it can it works top-down through national authoritative agencies, education,

the media and political pressure. It can be militant and destructive, as happened

between the World Wars. It has been used not only to vilify foreign elements,

however useful or relevant they might be, but also to reinforce national standards

at the expense of regional and social variants, for instance as a lever against the

growth of regional sentiment. Significantly, there were no studies of Russian ‘‘sub-

standard language’’ (whether socially or regionally ‘‘sub-standard’’) between 1932

and the end of the Stalin era (Perelmuter, 1976: 95).

A more moderate approach to language regulation and growth is the ‘‘culture of

language’’ (Cz kultura jazyka, Rus kul

ra jazyka

/re

i, Ger Sprachpflege). This set

of attitudes was apparently first nurtured in the pre-Revolutionary Moscow

550 11. Sociolinguistics

Linguistic Circle (Rothstein, 1976), and was widely supported in the 1920s, parti-

cularly in Czechoslovakia, where anti-German attitudes were expressed in the

journal Nas

. There is no satisfactory equivalent – or activity – in English for

this concept. Among the Czechs it was combined with the functionalist approach of

the Prague Linguistic Circle, and referred to the development, oversight and

enrichment of the language (Havra

nek and Weingart, 1932). This theme was

echoed in Russia by Vinokur (1929).

11.3 Standard written and spoken variants

The degree of regulation and the explicit fostering of ‘‘pure’’ language have tended

to distance the formal canons of the modern Slavic written languages from the

spoken standards and from the dialects more than is the case in contemporary

English, where a generally lower level of regulation, and a more relaxed attitude to

acceptable variation in the many standard forms of English, have helped the

spoken language to penetrate more easily into the written media. On the other

hand, written Slavic languages on the Internet are almost as chaotic, creative and

undisciplined as their English counterparts, and Slavic languages have become

more flexible and open to innovation since the fall of Communism.

All Slavic languages show lively spoken variants which are distinct from

dialects. The nature of these spoken variants vis-a

-vis the national standard

depends on two principal factors: the degree of archaicity of the national stand-

ard; and the geographical distance between the capital and the dialect area on

which the national standard is based. Slovak, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have

felt the effect of geographical distance between the capital and the dialect focus of

the national standard. In the case of Slovak (D

urovic

, 1980), this serves to limit

the impact of Bratislava Slovak on the national standard. Before its separation

Serbo-Croatian was pl uricentric, with two linguistic capitals, two standard vari-

ants and a geographical dialect base corresponding to neither of the capitals

(2.2.4, 10.2.2).

The question of an archaic national standard poses different problems. Four of

the modern Slavic languages – Czech, Slovenian, Sorbian and, to some extent,

Russian – include in their national standards elements of older standards which

were deliberately made part of the modern written medium.

If Sorbian is analysed as two languages, then it looks more like Serbo-Croatian,

with two major variants distinguished by features of phonology, grammar and lexis

(2.4.2). Unlike Serbo-Croatian, however, written Sorbian has a direct line of

inheritance from established seventeenth-century models. The status of standard

Sorbian is influenced by two major issues: the relative status of Upper and Lower

11.3 Standard written and spoken variants 551

Sorbian as variants of a single language, or as independent languages; and the

relation of both to the presence of German.

There are intriguing issues of the Sorbian spoken language in its contact with

the numerically dominant Germans. Upper Sorbian, for instance, shows the

influence of German in its use of the deictic to

n ‘that’ as a definite article, and

jedyn ‘one’ as an indefinite article, although the syntactic functions are not wholly

identical with the syntax of the German articles. This contrasts with the post-

posed articles of Bulgarian, Macedonian (5.5.1) and northern Russian dialects

(10.3.3), though it mirrors a growing phenomenon in spoken Czech ( Townsend,

1990: 101–102) and Polish. Other features of the modern Sorbian spoken

standard include a preference for the nominative in complements of byc

‘be’

rather than a choice between the nominative or the instrumental. More striking

still is the use of the auxiliary USorb wordowac

(LSorb wordowas

) þ Passive

Participle, on the model of German werden, to form passives (1a). The written

Sorbian standard would use a reflexive ( (1b); and see 7.3.2; examples from Stone,

1986: 101):

(1) USorb ‘the flight departure will be prepared’

a. spoken: wule

t worduje pr

ihotowany

b. written: wule

tsopr

ihotuje

Other extensive areas of German interference are to be found in Sorbian dialects

(10.4.1). The Sorbs have made efforts to purify their language from Germanisms,

but the dominant presence of German in the Sorbian area is such that major

German penetration of the language is unavoidable.

We shall select two examples to give a more detailed illustration of the differences

and tensions between the written and spoken standards: Russian and Czech.

11.3.1 Russian

In the 1960s the Russian Language Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences

undertook an original and ideologically potentially challenging investigation of

contemporary Russian, which was published under the title Russkij jazyk i sovet-

skoe obs

estvo (‘The Russian language and Soviet society’: Panov, 1968; Krysin,

1974). It involved a wide-ranging study of non-dialectal variation in modern

Russian, including ideologically sensitive social factors like membership of the

intelligentsia. This study, which was thoroughly assessed in Comrie and Stone

(1978), confirms that the Revolution democratized, rather than removed, the pre-

Revolutionary standard language. Many features of what used to be sub-standard

Russian have become acceptable colloquial, and many features formerly colloquial

552 11. Sociolinguistics

have become part of the standard, particularly in pronunciation, while features of

the former standard have become archaic.

The questionnaire for the study on Russian and Soviet society was distributed

only to native-speaker informants who had completed secondary education and

were living in urban areas. As expected, the language of writers and journalists was

closest to the standard, and blue-collar workers furthest, with other ‘‘intellectuals’’

and white-collar workers in between. The survey also confirmed that:

The spread of education [after the Revolution] led to the adoption of

standard features into the speech of those who had previously used

non-standard varieties of the language. Over all [sic], the latter has

been the more powerful factor: except perhaps for the immediate post-

Revolutionary years, there has been no trend to reject the traditional

standard as a whole in favour of a norm closer to the actual usage of

the working class.

(Comrie and Stone, 1978: 21)

The Soviet Academy’s study, however, also showed that there was more variation

in standard Russian than had previously been suspected, and that some of this

variation had social correlates. The survey also confirmed a number of important

distinctions between the written standard, the spoken standard and other spoken

variants of Russian. Even before the Revolution, as Comrie and Stone (1978)

observe, Russian was both socially and dialectally less diverse than many

European languages. It was also stylistically more sensitized to non-standard

forms, partly through the stratified nature of Russian society and the conventions

of correct and polite usage at the higher levels. This sensitivity to stylistic appro-

priateness remains today, and can be seen in the large set of descriptors which

Russian dictionaries, normative grammars (Ickovic

, 1968) and stylistic manuals

use to describe not only the functional styles of Russian but also the precise stylistic

quality of constructions and particularly lexical items. These include some descrip-

tors which are not easily paralleled in English, like prostore

ie ‘popular speech’

(Marszk, 1988). This is not the same as razgovo

rnaja rec

, which refers to colloquial

usage which may or may not be part of the standard (Patton, 1988). Prostore

ie,on

the other hand, is more pejorative, and refers to popular usage, especially non-

standard urban popular usage.

Russians have traditionally been sensitive about propriety, as well as prescrip-

tion, of linguistic usage. We can see this clearly in the synchronic variation found

between some forms of Russian which reflect changes which have taken place

since the Revolution (for vocabulary, see chapter 9, and for patterns of address,

see 11.4.1). One of these parameters of variation concerns pronunciation. At the turn

of the century spoken Russian had an accepted standard pronunciation known

11.3 Standard written and spoken variants 553

as the ‘Old Moscow Norm’, even though the capital was in St. Petersburg (later

Petrograd, then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again). There was linguistic rivalry

between Moscow and St. Petersburg, including issues like the pronunciation of the

sound represented by the letter x /s

/ and by sequences like pv ‘sc

’and˛v ‘zc

’:

Moscow favored a long palatalized fricative [

ø] while St. Petersburg preferred

[

]. In contemporary Russian the long palatalized fricative [

ø] is dominant

except across transparent morpheme boundaries like Preposition + Noun, or

Prefix + Root, as in rasc

ˇi

‘to clear (an account)’ [r

h¨

(t)

æt

]. Comrie

and Stone (1978: ch. 1) ascribe this to a tendency to spelling pronunciation, which

marks a social effect of literacy on the national standard. The move toward spelling

pronunciation turns out to be even more widespread than this: there is a move away

from the old ecclesiastical pronunciation of

/g/ as [˜]or[œ] in favor of [g], so that

compounds beginning with blago-,likeblagosklo

nnyj ‘favorable’, are now pro-

nounced [blag-]. Spelling effects are also evident in the move from the [-

j] pronun-

ciation for adjectival endings in -kij, -gij and -xij,asintı

xij ‘quiet’, in favor of [-hj].

This pronunciation has continued to spread rapidly and is now well established

(Comrie, Stone and Polinsky, 1996: 46–49).

The domain of word- and phrase-stress (Krysin, 1974: 223–241) is also undergoing

change, largely in the direction of the removal of variation and exceptions. This

tendency mirrors the more progressive southern dialects of Russian, while in the

north traditional stress patterns (like the morphological paradigms) are better main-

tained. The tendency to regularization results in fewer stress alternations of the type

golova

[NomSg] ‘head’, go

lovu [AccSg], go

lovy [NomPl], golova

m [DatPl], in both

singular and plural, so that alternation within a singular or plural paradigm is reduced:

(2) Rus ‘water’

NomSg NomPl DatPl

Formerly: voda

dy voda

Now: voda

dy vo

dam

The stressed preposition in some Preposition + Noun phrases is declining, except in

conventionalized combinations like za

gorod ‘out of town’ (accusative ¼ motion/

direction). And monosyllabic-root prefixed verbs like ot-da

‘to give up’, which used

to stress the prefix in the masculine singular past, are tending toward root stress:

tdal ‘he gave up’ > otda

l. A similar movement of stress toward the root is found with

the stressed reflexive suffix -sja

, which used to be found in a few verbs. This stress

pattern now tends to be replaced by more regular stem-stress (rodilsja

‘he was

born’ > rodı

lsja).

Within morphology two broad tendencies are asserting themselves: a more

analytic approach at the expense of some traditional synthetic forms (Comrie

554 11. Sociolinguistics

and Stone, 1978: chs. 3–4), and again a tendency to regularization and the reduc-

tion of variation. Regularization can be found in the lessening vacillation of gender

in nouns which used to be seen as either masculine or feminine ( fil

m ‘film’ is now

masculine, while due

‘duel’ is feminine); Schupbach (1984) notes an even greater

regularization offered by the decline of the neuter gender and nouns of the third

(feminine, i-) declension. The partitive genitive in -u (with masculine nouns of

the o/jo-declension) is giving way to the genitive in -a, though there are a few

nouns which still cannot take a partitive genitive in -a (da

jte c

ˇajku´

/*c

ˇajka

, ‘give

[me] some tea’). Numerals, especially complex numerals, are losing their case forms

in oblique case contexts, as has already happened in some other Slavic languages

(5.5.4). On the other hand, there is a growing number of nominative plural forms of

masculine nouns in stressed -a

, which have been gaining ground since the turn

of the century (profe

ssory ‘professors’ [NomPl] > professora

, with the resulting

concomitant stressing of all the plural inflexions).

The tendency to a more analytic approach in morphology and syntax can

be found in the increasing quantities of indeclinable nouns, both regular and

borrowed, as well as those resulting from abbreviating processes like stump

compounds and acronyms (9.5.3). Nouns in apposition are also showing an

increasing tendency not to inflect:

(3a) Rus reka

[NomSg] Vo

lga [NomSg] ‘the River Volga’

(3b) Rus na reke

[LocSg] Vo

lga [NomSg] ‘on the River Volga’

In such cases the syntactic function of the noun can be determined only from the

grammatical context. There is also some levelling of case usage: the genitive direct

object after transitive verbs is giving way to the accusative (6.2.3). And semantic

factors are exerting a strong influence on grammatical ones, as when verbs of

‘‘directing’’ and ‘‘controlling’’ like rukovodı

‘to direct’ tend to abandon a governed

accusative in favor of the instrumental. There is also a growing tendency for

semantic agreement to win over syntactic agreement (Corbett, 1983: 30–39), an

issue which has become more acute in the post-Communist era as western notions

of political correctness have become more evident in the Slavic languages:

(4) Rus ‘the doctor came’

vrac

pris

doctor [Male referent] come-PastMascSg

vrac

pris

el/pris

doctor [Female referent] come-PastMascSg/PastFemSg

Here a grammatically conservative tradition of gender-maintenance is coming into

conflict with social and political agendas of issues like gender equality.

11.3 Standard written and spoken variants 555

Spoken colloquial Russian (ru

sskaja razgovo

rnaja rec

) is even more richly

varied. It shows a series of features typical among the Slavic colloquial variants

vis-a

-vis the national standard: heightened creativity, looser norms, ellipsis and the

productive violation of the rules of the standard language for the purposes of

expressive communication. Most of the following examples are taken from

Zemskaja (1973). Phonetically, we find the predictable features of allegro speech:

simplification of consonant clusters and syllable structure and the dropping of

unstressed syllables:

(5) sejc

s ‘immediately’ CS-Rus [s

h¨t

as] Colloq-Rus [

as]

as well as a much higher frequency of conversation-oriented particles like de

skat

and -to:

(6a) Rus on, de

skat

, prostudı

lsja

‘he they say has fallen ill’

(6b) Rus une

kza

meny-to sdany

uzˇe

at her exams-Particle sat already

‘has she sat her exams already?’

More interesting, however, are the ways in which the language is restructured in the

colloquial variants. Notable among the grammatical features of Spoken Colloquial

Russian is the use of the vocative for kinship terms and diminutive forms of people’s

forenames in -a. The standard language has only two instances of the vocative left,

both referring to the Deity (7a). The colloquial vocative of forenames and kinship

terms is formed by removing the final -a, leaving either a soft or hard stem (7b):

(7a) Nom Voc

CS-Rus Bog ‘God’ Bo

zˇ e ! ‘O Lord!’

Gospo

‘Lord’ Go

spodi! ‘Goodness!’

(7b) Colloq-Rus dja

dja ‘uncle’ djad’![d

æt

] ‘uncle!’

a ‘Sasha’ Sas

! ‘Sasha!’

Not unexpectedly, some of the more esoteric morphology of the standard language,

like exceptions to case-formation rules, often fail. The Soviet Russian author

Zoshchenko, in a celebrated short story called ‘The bath-house’, has the central

character, a man of very modest education, decline the indeclinable noun pal

‘overcoat’ as an instrumental singular: idu

za pal

m ‘I’m going to get my coat’

(instead of the indeclinable form pal

Spoken Colloquial Russian also has enclitic pronouns, which are unknown in the

standard East Slavic languages, this being one of the features which distinguishes

556 11. Sociolinguistics

them clearly from West and South Slavic. Russian already knows about the ‘‘second

grammatical position’’ or ‘‘Wackernagel position’’ in the sentence, as can be seen

from the syntax of particles like li (Question) (7.1.2.4) and by (Conditional)

(5.5.5.7). Spoken Colloquial Russian can apply this syntax to unstressed personal

pronouns, particularly accusatives (Shapiro, 1968: 25):

(8) ‘I see you’

Colloq-Rus ja

vı

zˇ u (*ja

vı

zˇ u t

)

I you-Acc-Encl see

CS-Rus ja

tebja

vı

zˇ u / j a

vı

zˇu tebja

I you-Acc see / I see you-Acc

A typical example of the relaxation of grammatical rules is in the omission of the

complementizer c

to ‘that’, which is obligatory in the standard language, but

optional in colloquial speech:

(9) Rus Va

nja zna

et, (c

ˇto

) ona

nezdoro

vitsja

‘Vanja knows (that) she is unwell’

Of the various complementizers, c

ˇto

‘what’ and kak ‘how’ are omissible in most

colloquial contexts; kogda

‘when’, gde ‘where’, kuda

‘whither’ and otku

‘whence’ are omissible only in more transparent contexts (Zemskaja, 1973:

356–357). More unexpected is the omission of relative pronouns, accompanied

by frequent perturbations in the normal word order:

(10) Colloq-Rus Lju

da, ty

knı

-zˇ-ku ja

dal-a

proc

ˇl-a

Ljuda you book-Dim-Acc I gave-Fem read-Fem?

CS-Rus Lju

da, ty

proc

ˇl-a

knı

gu, koto

ruju ja

Ljuda you read-Fem book which I

tebe

dal-a

you-Dat gave-Fem?

‘Ljuda, have you read the book (which) I gave you?’

Word order in the colloquial language is freer, with modifiers and heads being

moved from their standard locations in the sentence, and particularly from their

standard adjacent locations, in the interests of information management, emphasis

and expressiveness:

(11) ‘my yellowish pen’

Colloq-Rus zˇ

elt(en

k)aja moja

ˇka

yellow(ish) my pen

CS-Rus moja

zˇ

elt(en

k)aja ru

ˇka

11.3 Standard written and spoken variants 557

Conjunctions may appear after the conjuncts (Zemskaja, 1973: 394):

(12) ‘it will be unpleasant if it rains’

Colloq-Rus neprija

tno do

zˇ d

pojd

et e

sli

unpleasant-NeutSg rain [will go] if

CS-Rus neprija

tno, e

sli pojd

et do

zˇ d

Major constituents of embedded clauses can appear outside their clause and before

the conjunction:

(13) ‘are you satisfied when visitors come to (see) dad?’

Colloq-Rus dovo

na ty

sti kogda

prixo

djat k pa

pe?

pleased you visitors when they come to dad?

CS-Rus ty

dovo

na, kogda

sti prixo

djat k pa

pe?

Lexically the colloquial standard shows a heightened use of diminutive, augmen-

tative and pejorative suffixes on adjectives and especially nouns, as well as vigorous

neologisms and creative patterns with existing word-forming lexical material and

morphology. Very common is the tendency to transform Adjective + Noun

phrases into a nominal based on the modifier or adjective root and the nominal

suffix -k(a)or-lk(a). The gender of the underlying noun is sometimes retained, and

sometimes not (‘‘univerbacija’’, see 9.5.3.2):

(14) Rus Vec

rnjaja gaze

ta [Fem] ‘evening newspaper’ > Vec

erka [Fem]

komissio

nnyj magazı

n [Masc] ‘second-hand shop’ >

komissio

nka [Fem]

This pattern is also used for well known places:

(15) Rus Bibliote

ka ı

meni Le

nina ‘the Lenin library’ > Le

ninka

(via *Le

ninskaja bibliote

ka)

(The name of the library has now been changed to Ru

sskaja Gosuda

rstvennaja

Bibliote

ka ‘Russian State Library’, but it is still known as Le

ninka.) A given form in

-k(a) can, depending on the context, have a number of different possible referents:

(16) Rus akademı

ˇka

a. hospital of the Academy

b. dining room of the Academy

c. library of the Academy

Many such forms are expected in the colloquial language: it is unusual to

use e

lektrı

eskij po

ezd or even e

lektropo

ezd ‘electric train’ instead of e

lektrı

ka.

558 11. Sociolinguistics