Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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In Polish it is also common to use certain terms, including religious kinship terms,

for 2 Person polite address: ksia˛ dz ‘priest’, kolega ‘colleague’ and siostra ‘sister

[nun]’, as well as tata ‘daddy’, mama ‘mummy’, ciocia ‘aunt’, babcia ‘grandma’ and

a small number of related words:

(25) Pol czy ciocia by chciała kawy?

Q aunt Cond like-Fem coffee

‘would you [i.e. aunt] like some coffee?’

These forms are certainly used in other Slavic languages, but less commonly for

2 Person address. Using ciocia in this way is less formal than pani, and more

respectful than ty.

The Catholic and Protestant Slavs have Christian names and surnames, with one

or more additional names often relating to saints’ days. Orthodox Slavs have

names formed from a forename (which in the Russian empire was originally chosen

from a list specified by the church); in East Slavic a patronymic formed from the

father’s name with the addition of a suffix; and a surname. If the father’s name is

Iva

n, for instance, a male child will have the patronymic Iva

novic

, normally abbre-

viated in pronunciation to [i¨vançt

], and a daughter will have the patronymic

Iva

novna, abbreviated to [i¨vanø

]. The hereditary surname, which became common

usage from the time of Peter the Great, is also often formed from a forename,

e.g. Iva

v (variant stress). It may also be derived from place names (the River Lena

in Siberia gave its name to Le

nin, whose surname was actually the more prosaic

nov), or from common nouns (Rus gorb ‘hunch, hump’, Gorbac

ev). Sta

lin

originally had the surname Dzˇuga

vili, but he changed it to a name derived from

Rus stal

‘steel’ (Unbegaun, 1972; Benson, 1992).

The prototypes of titles were the nobility, and hierarchies of the civil service,

institutionalized in Russia by Peter the Great into the Table of Ranks, with

fourteen levels, and appropriate forms of address in five layers. The Bolsheviks

abolished these ranks in 1919, together with Rus gospodı

n ‘Mr.’ and gospozˇa

‘Mrs.’.

They introduced Rus tova

ris

‘comrade’, and Rus grazˇdanı

n [Masc], grazˇda

nka

[Fem] ‘citizen’, a pattern which was promoted in other Slavic languages as they

were communized.

Some Slavic languages share the German tendency to address people by title, or to

include professional designations in modes of address: for instance, Herr Ober! ‘Head

Waiter!’ has been translated literally into Czech as Pane Vrchnı

! The question of

combining titles, forenames and pronouns is complex and delicate. As Stone observes,

There are few, if any, combinations of nominal and pronominal

address forms which can be regarded as totally impossible. Indeed,

11.4 Sociolectal variation 569

the fact that T/V and T/P [i.e. pan, etc. – RS, PC] systems are com-

plemented by, but not strictly correlated with, systems of nominal

address makes possible a greater degree of subtlety in the reflection

of social relationships than would otherwise be so. (Stone, 1977: 503)

In addition, there is an isogloss – perhaps an isonym – between the languages with

patronymics, the languages without patronymics excluding Polish, and Polish.

With patronymic languages, of which Russian is a prime example, it is possible

to have any of the three names alone, though solitary patronymics are now some-

what dated: Lenin was sometimes called Il

(the patronymic from Il

). The main

combinations involve either ‘forename + patronymic’, or ‘forename + surname’,

or all three, but not usually ‘patronymic + surname’, or ‘short forename + surname’,

on its own (Comrie and Stone, 1978: 181). Under Communism Rus tova

ris

was

more neutral than Rus grazˇdanı

n/grazˇda

nka, the latter being associated with

policemen addressing possibly wayward citizens. Tova

ris

was nonetheless clearly

associated with Party membership and Party solidarity. It was widely used in

official contexts, and in the army:

(26) Rus [Soldier to officer]

Tova

ris

kapita

n, mo

zˇno ...

‘Comrade captain, can (I) ...’

This usage is still alive in the armed forces. The plural tova

ris

i! became a

more neutral inclusive form of address to groups of people of either sex, not unlike

Eng guys! (now rebja

ta lit. ‘children’). Contemporary Russian usage is still uncer-

tain: tova

ris

and grazˇdanı

n, and also (previously already impolite) muzˇc

ˇı

‘man’ and zˇ e

ina ‘woman’, are no longer acceptable, while molodo

elove

‘young man’ and de

vus

ka ‘girl, young lady, miss’ have survived for younger

addressees.

Addressing an unknown person in Russian requires izvinı

te ... ‘excuse me ...’

and the use of the polite vy, avoiding other address forms altogether. On the other

hand, the formula ‘forename + patronymic + vy’ (e.g. Rus Iva

n Petro

vic

, ... vy)

covers formal public occasions as well as contexts of more intimate contact with

elders and seniors, and is very widely used because of this neutrality. It is less formal

to exchange ‘forename + vy’, and still less formal to use forename, with or without

diminutive suffixes, and ty. Nakhimovsky (1976: 90) cross-correlates these three

levels with age and generation: it is harder for older generations to reach the level of

formality of the ‘forename + ty’ pattern of the younger generation.

Non-patronymic languages other than Polish superimposed in public life a

Russian-like Soviet pattern of address on native address formulae. Cz soudruh,

570 11. Sociolinguistics

Slk su

druh, Blg druga

r, Mac dru

gar ‘comrade’ were used in many contexts in

parallel to Rus tova

ris

, particularly in combination with titles of positions in

organizations:

(27) Slk su

druh akademik!

‘Comrade Academician!’

In Polish, on the other hand, some of the functions of the patronymic are paralleled

by pan (etc.), so that where Russian has ‘forename + patronymic’, Polish may have

‘pan + forename’:

(28a) Rus Iva

n Iva

novic

, gde

‘Ivan Ivanovich, where are you?’

(28b) Pol Panie Janie, gdzie pan jest?

‘Mr. Jan, where are you?’

Pol pan also overlaps with Rus tova

ris

when combined with titles and designations

of social office. Pol towarzysz was relatively infrequent under Communism, and the

rhetoric of Party solidarity was consequently less intrusive in Polish. Towarzysz is

now largely defunct:

(29a) Rus Tova

ris

Prezide

nt, ja

...

‘(Comrade) President, I ...’

(29b) Pol Panie Prezydencie, ja ...

‘Mr. President, I ...’

The rules for the use of forenames in Polish, with or without ty, are approximately

as in the other languages.

11.4.2 After Communism

The post-Communist social profile of the Slavic languages is multi-faceted,

unstable and hard to grasp. In their public use the languages have radically altered

to become more Western-like. There is less adherence to centralized norms, and a

wider range of styles, including the extremely colloquial and the extremely vulgar,

with neologisms and extensive borrowing, especially from English. Journalism is

much more flamboyant and idiosyncratic. And the range of publicly discussed

topics is much larger. Recent issues of the online Polish women’s journal

Polki.pl (http://polki.wp.pl), which is published through the web site Wirtualna

Polska, cover the same range of material as is found in parallel Western publica-

tions, including sexuality, homosexuality and abortion, topics which did not find a

11.4 Sociolectal variation 571

place in comparable publications under Communism. The vocabulary has

expanded correspondingly:

(30a) Rus Bespla

tnyj komme

eskij xo

sting, c

ty i konfere

ncii

‘Free and commercial hosting, chats and conferences’

(30b) Pol Tatu – zmierzch homomarketingu

‘Tatu [Russian pop group] – the twilight of homo(sexual)

marketing’

Western patterns are also evident in marketing, which was commercially

subdued under Communism. Advertising is not only Western in visual present-

ation and design but often also in language, where there is frequent borrowing from

and code-switching with English. We find mixed codes especially in popular culture

like MTV, and most of all in Internet styles (email, chat rooms, web sites), where

the osmosis with Western patterns is especially unobstructed. English lexis is often

used with little restraint: Pol cool sajt ‘cool site’, which incidentally violates the

order of nominal heads and modifiers (7.5, see also 9.8), or Pol fan cluby ‘fan clubs’,

which also violates Polish orthography, since there is already an accepted word

klub ‘club’. Still more extravagant are teenage argots.

Code-switching has been a feature of Slavic for centuries – Tolstoy, at the start of

War and Peace, has a famous episode where aristocratic Russian women are having

trouble in finding Russian vocabulary as they code-switch between Russian and

French. Code-switching into Western lexis, and especially English, was increas-

ingly common in youth culture during the last two decades of Communism. Direct

contact with Western lexis, values and practices, partly through capitalism and

marketing, partly through the media, and now in accelerated form via the Internet,

places all the Slavic languages in a dynamic and unstable situation of vocabulary

and stylistic evolution.

Purists deplore this commercialization, internationalization and globalization of

Slavic. The conservative agencies like the language academies and educational

bodies are tracking the new developments, and in many cases trying to apply

cautious and conservative delays to their approval. There are major debates

about the integrity and directions of the national languages in the face of this

new global challenge.

11.5 Bilingualism and diglossia

For centuries foreign political and cultural pressures have forced the Slavs to be

linguistically aware of their neighbors, and of each other, resulting in extensive

572 11. Sociolinguistics

diglossia and bi- or multilingualism. Diglossia has been a major factor not only in

the general sociolinguistics of Slavic, but also in the formation of the standard

languages and in their relation to the prestigious religious languages, especially

Church Slavonic (2.2.1).

The classic formulation of diglossia is Ferguson’s:

Diglossia is a relatively stable linguistic situation in which, in addi-

tion to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a

standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly

codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety,

the vehicle of a large and respected body of literature, either of an

earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned

largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal

spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for

ordinary conversation.

(Ferguson, 1959: 336)

In some of the languages there are very significant differences between the standard

language and the local variants. Two literary languages – Czech and, to a lesser

degree, Slovenian – have been deliberately modelled on much older literary monu-

ments, which has created a diglossic gap between them and the various spoken

forms of the language. Czech (11.3.2) is probably the most extreme example of

Slavic diglossia. Polish, Sorbian, Slovenian and Russian all show a conservatism in

the written language, which can become increasingly distant from the contempor-

ary spoken language with the passage of time. The strong influence of normative

grammars, and the authority of the political and educational structures supporting

that national language, have the effect of insulating the written language from

rapid change, or even from responding quickly to innovations in the spoken

language.

Because of their dialect structure (chapter 10), all Slavic languages present a

potentially diglossic situation between the national standard and a regional var-

iant. Some dialects are relatively close to the standard literary language. This is

particularly clear with the recently evolved literary languages like Macedonian and

Belarusian, which were based specifically on selected regional dialects. But the

richness of the Slavic dialect map, combined with (officially) universal literacy

based on the national standard, create and institutionalize a typical diglossic

situation. This pattern has not been fundamentally altered by a certain reduction

in the vitality of regional variants, and some dialect levelling. For some Slavs,

particularly those living close to the geographical centre of the national language’s

regional base, the gap between the local variant and the national standard can be

11.5 Bilingualism and diglossia 573

relatively slight. But for others the adjustments are very considerable. Eastern

Slovak, for instance, has penultimate stress like Polish, while standard Slovak

has initial stress. North Russian pronounces unstressed /o/ as [O], in contrast to

[

] and [L] in Contemporary Standard Russian. And in the Polish regional variant

called ‘‘mazurzenie’’ (10.4.2) the pronunciation of fricatives and affricates differs

radically from that of standard Polish.

The situation in former Yugoslavia was more complex still. There the standard

pronunciation – and to some extent the grammar and lexis – of Serbo-Croatian

were significantly different from major dialect areas in Croatia and Serbia, espe-

cially at the geographical extremes in western Croatia and south-eastern Serbia.

There was the additional factor of multilingualism, not only for e

migre

minorities,

like the groups of Albanians and Romanians, but also for the Slovenes and

Macedonians. Serbo-Croatian, as the language of inter-cultural communication,

was taught universally in the school system, and as a foreign language for the

Slovenes and Macedonians. A similar situation is found with the Kashubians in

Northern Poland, who have to learn Polish; and for the Sorbs, who live in a

German-dominated society.

A very different example of diglossi a is described by Magner (1978) in the

language of the inhabitants of Split in Croatia. Even in Zagreb the local kajka-

vian ekavian dialect (10.2.2) is in a diglossic relation to Croatian, let alone the

former Serbian variant. In Split, however, historical as well as ethnic factors

conspire to present a sociolinguistic situation of particular interest. Italian was

the official language of this part of Dalmatia from the fifteenth century until the

formation of the Yugoslav state in 1918, and the Split dialect contains a large

number of words and phrases of Italian origin. In contemporary Split, however,

the diglossic focus is on the distribution of sociolinguistic functions between

what Magner calls ‘‘textbook Croatian’’ (the former official Croatian variant

of Serbo-Croatian), the various versions of spoken (even educated spoken)

Croatian, and the local dialect. Inhabitants of Split have to learn the relation

not only between the ‘‘H’’ (high) and ‘‘L’’ (low) varieties but also the differing

degrees of ‘‘H’’ which are countenanced. In Split, for instance, as in most

Croatian dialects, /h/ is not pronounced, though it is meant to be in official

‘‘textbook’’ Croatian (Brabec, Hraste and Z

ivkovic

1968: 31). In some contexts

/h/ is realized as zero: Cr hladno, Split ladno ‘cold’. After back vowels the Split

dialect realizes /h/ as [v], as in Cr kruh, Split kruv ‘bread’; but after front vowels

the Split dialect realizes /h/ as [j]: Cr ih, Split ij ‘them’ (similar to the selection of

prothetic consonants in languages like Sorbian: 3.2.1.4). The contrasts are even

more pronounced in the tonal system, since Split has only a contrast of length in

the vowels (Magner, 1978: 409):

574 11. Sociolinguistics

(31) ekavian (Serbian) ikavian (e.g. Split) jekavian (Croatian)

me%sto ‘place’ mı¯ sto mje%sto

mle

ko ‘milk’ mlı¯ ko mlije

no ‘hay’ sı¯ no sı%jeno

p ‘beautiful’ lı¯ plı%jep

pa [Fem] lı¯ pa lije

‘beautiful’

These details will give some idea of the complexity of the issues which face language

communities where there are not only local dialects, but also conflicting variants of

the official standard. Magner and Matejka (1971) have shown that the tone and

length features of standard Serbo-Croatian were better preserved in rural areas

than in the towns, where mixing of variants tended to make tone, and particularly

post-tonic length, unstable.

All these examples of diglossia and bilingualism apply to languages in the home-

land, where the contemporary language situation is the result of long and steady

cultural development and interaction. The situation with external multilingualism

has different historical roots. The important factor here is not the difference

between standard and non-standard varieties of the same language, but the gap

between two different languages – either on the same soil (German in the West Slav

lands and Slovenia, Turkish in the Balkans, Russian in Ukraine and Belarus), or as

the imitation of foreign models. All the Slavic languages, irrespective of size, have a

long and continuous educational and cultural tradition of multilingualism. In the

twentieth century the incentive to master other languages was directed to two main

foci: Russian; and Western European languages, especially English and German.

Before the fall of Euro-Communism Russian was taught at primary and second-

ary schools; within the Soviet Union it was made compulsory by decree in 1938. It

was also an obligatory component of many university courses in the Eastern Bloc.

At least a passive knowledge of Russian was considered necessary for public and

intellectual life, especially within the USSR. Russian literature and culture were

promoted, in translation and in the original, through the media and education.

Russian was an administrative lingua franca of the USSR, but its status is now

declining in favour of English, German and French. Russian is still one of the

official languages of the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Health

Organization and other international bodies.

Russian was resented as the language of the dominant political-economic cul-

ture. Education policy, indeed, presented Russian as more of a second native

language than a lingua franca (Kreindler, 1982). In spite of the official standing

of Russian in the secondary and tertiary curriculum throughout Eastern Europe

11.5 Bilingualism and diglossia 575

and the USSR, Russian was neither popular as a subject nor educationally very

effective. After what was often ten years of compulsory instruction, many students

had only a perfunctory knowledge of the language. Within the Soviet Union there

were also special problems of national languages. The official guidelines had been

Lenin’s theories of nationality, language-culture autonomy, and the supra-national

nature of the USSR itself. These ideas, which were written into the Constitution of

the USSR, stated that language-cultures must be able to pursue culture and

education in their own tongues. There was much debate over the interpretation

and implementation of this policy in the history of education in the USSR.

In Stalin’s time many national minorities were subjected to a brutal policy of forced

Russification. This took several forms. The least subtle method was by ethnic

dilution. Native speakers were moved elsewhere, and Russians were moved in –

for example in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – though here the

situation is now reversed, with ethnic Russians required to acculturate to the

local national language). Russian schools were provided for the new resident

Russian minorities. The superior employment opportunities for proficient

Russian speakers then attracted non-Russian speakers to the Russian-language

schools, in which there were often as many Russian as non-Russian children.

People who had been moved outside their ethnic homeland would send their

children to Russian-language schools rather than to a school using the local

language. In an era of militant official anti-nationalism, it was easy to label ethnic

spirit as ‘‘bourgeois nationalism’’ or ‘‘national provincialism’’, while Russian was

associated with the supra-national spirit, especially in its role of the language for

popularizing Communism:

Though theoretically elective, Russian is widely studied in all types of

schools as a required second native tongue and as a language of inter-

national communication and ‘‘socialist culture’’.

(Kreusler, 1963: 75)

This notion was explicitly pursued in the journal Russkij jazyk v nacional

noj s

kole

(‘Russian in the Ethnic School’), which discusses and proposes policy, materials

and methods for the teaching of Russian in non-Russian schools. The promotion of

Russian abroad is also the responsibility of the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, which

functions like the Alliance Franc¸ aise or the Goethe Institut.

Within the Soviet Union, Russian was an indispensable language for universal

communication. Geographical mobility inside the USSR required a knowledge of

Russian. Publication in intellectual fields was principally in Russian, and writers

or scholars anxious for general recognition tended to write in R ussian. Russian

was consequently the dominant language of publishing, for national reasons as

576 11. Sociolinguistics

well as by virtue of being the most populous single language in the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian and Belarusian received less publishing space than was warranted by

their population status within the USSR, a nd many smaller languages fared much

worse.

11.6 The Slavic languages abroad

(In this section we do not provide indications for stress, length or tone in migrant

Slavic data, since reports of most of the data do not include this information, which

is among the most error-prone areas of e

migre

Slavic.)

The Slavs do not rank with the world’s great navigating nations. Unlike the

far-ranging Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French and, especially, British, the Slavs

were not responsible for global exploration by sea. Indeed, by the time the Russian

merchant marine and navy were properly organized by Peter the Great – no other

Slavic nation has had serious maritime pretensions – the imperial seaborne land-

grab was virtually over. The Slavs, it is true, did make important expansions by

land – like Bulgaria, Bohemia and Poland-Lithuania, in their respective periods of

glory, and Russia in its long maintained push toward the Pacific. With the excep-

tion of the Russian imperialist expansion to the east, however, these movements

had no major lasting linguistic effects on the conquered territories. This means that,

apart from the case of Russian in Imperial Russia and later the USSR, the Slavs

have no counterpart to the European languages which were established officially in

the colonial and post-colonial empires: Spanish and Portuguese in South America;

English and French in Africa, South East Asia and through much of the Pacific;

Dutch in South Africa and the Indies; and English in the Americas, Africa, Asia,

Australasia and the Pacific. Nevertheless, when we consider the current distribu-

tion of the world’s languages, we find very substantial numbers of Slavs outside

the geographical and ethnic homelands, in North America, Australasia, in other

European countries and, to a lesser degree, in South America and Africa. These

modern Slavic e

migre

populations date from the nineteenth century, particularly

from its second half, when economic conditions in Eastern Europe and Russia

forced the mass migration of Slavs, especially to North America; and from the

twentieth century as a result of political pressures.

Economic necessity was one major motive. The other was political necessity.

Political exile was nothing new for the Slavs. Scholars like Comenius, or exiles of

conscience like Herzen, are a few eloquent examples of people driven abroad by

their beliefs. For others the motive was semi-voluntary cultural exile. Many of the

best nineteenth-century Polish writers, and many Russians like Turgenev, spent

more time in Paris than they did at home. These three forces – money, belief and

11.6 Slavic languages abroad 577

art – contributed to the systematic and widespread dispersal of the Slavs over

Europe and North America and in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The political and military upheavals of the twentieth century did even more to

accelerate the emigration of the Slavs from their homelands. The immediate cause

was the First World War and its aftermath in the Russian Civil War. This disaster

had a profoundly unsettling effect on the Slavs. Millions perished. After 1918 many

Slavs found themselves still homeless in one or more of several categories: political

refugees from the Communist Revolution; economic refugees from hardship and

homelessness; or ethnic misfits in the redrawn political boundaries of Central

Europe, in which millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians, among others, were

delivered into ‘‘foreign’’ domination. These factors all promoted a further wave of

emigration, which was exacerbated by the Depression. The rise of Nazism and anti-

Semitism, and the horrors of the Second World War, repeated the social effects of the

First World War in heightened form – this time the West and South Slavs were

involved as well, and many left Europe to escape repatriation under the Yalta

Agreement. With the end of the Second World War, however, Slavic emigration

dwindled. The installation of the new Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the

Balkans was accompanied by rigorous restrictions on personal mobility, particularly

in the 1950s. It was difficult to leave the Eastern Bloc countries without exceptional

family or other circumstances. Yugoslavia, which remained politically outside the

Eastern Bloc, continued to permit migration, especially to North America and

Australasia. There were also large numbers of Yugoslav guest workers, especially

in West Germany. There was also something of a controlled thaw in the policies

governing the emigration of Jewish Slavs over the 1980s. Nevertheless, the non-

Yugoslav Slavic e

migre

communities were being replenished largely from within, and

emigration from the ethnic homeland continued to be numerically of small import-

ance. The end of Euro-Communism and the opening of the borders of Eastern

Europe, however, will substantially remove the category of ‘‘political refugee’’, and

will cause major changes in patterns of emigration and remigration to the homeland.

The largest groups of e

migre

Slavs are found in the U.S.A., which also has the

longest history of accepting Slavic migrants. Canada, Britain and France have

substantial Slavic minorities, as does Australasia. Greece has a large number of

ethnic Macedonians within its borders, while Hungary and Romania have certain

admixtures of longer resident Slavs. Smaller Slavic communities are found in other

European countries, in South America (mainly Brazil and Argentina) and Africa

(mainly South Africa). Hard figures are difficult to come by. The multicultural

basis of the Canadian Census of 1971 yielded rich material on the Slavs and

other e

migre

communities. But many countries, including the former German

Democratic Republic and Poland, have not given ethnic minorities an appropriate

578 11. Sociolinguistics