Alexey A. Gippius
Old Russian birchbark documents as a linguistic source: current state of the art and perspectives
The Old Russian (primarily Novgorodian) birchbark documents form a unique corpus of non-literary texts written in a local East Slavic variety of the late Common Slavic language, which underwent significant evolution throughout the life span of this writing tradition (11th–15th centuries). The linguistic potential of this source and its importance for Slavic studies were revealed by A. A. Zaliznyak, who made significant advancements in the study of birch bark documents in several respects. The discovery of the so-called vernacular graphic systems used in birch bark texts paved the way for a comprehensive revision of their readings, which, in turn, allowed for the identification of a number of previously unknown phonetic and morphological features of the Old Novgorod dialect. The grammatical (in a broad sense) description of this dialect played a fundamental role in shaping the current understanding of East Slavic glottogenesis and remains at the center of discussions on this topic.
The current phase of studying the birchbark documents is characterized by the following features. In terms of philology (the study of specific texts), it is marked by:
- a rapid increase in the number of birch bark documents due to new discoveries, with a gradual expansion of the geographical area where they are found;
- an ongoing process of refining the readings and interpretations of documents from past excavations (through new finds and other means);
- new possibilities for interpreting and reconstructing texts opened up by corpus technologies (the subcorpus of birchbark documents in the National Corpus of the Russian Language);
- a significantly improved level of lexicographical support for research;
- the use of digital technologies to read texts that are poorly preserved.
From a linguistic perspective, the current stage involves:
- in-depth exploration of the graphic systems used in birch bark manuscripts, drawing on typological data on the formation and adoption of syllabic writing systems;
- a focus on the pragmatics and communicative strategies of birchbark correspondence and documentation, which shape the specific interplay between oral and written elements; the use of comparable material from other traditions of “practical” writing in Antiquity and the Middle Ages;
- a highly differentiated examination of the material, enabling clarification of the chronology and sequence of linguistic changes;
- the integration of “berestology” (the study of birchbark documents) with other areas of linguistic source studies and historical Russian studies as a whole;
- the application of modern formal linguistic frameworks to the data from birch bark manuscripts and the use of this data in theoretical works.
The future prospects for linguistic study of birchbark documents are tied both to the further development of these trends and, importantly, to the opportunities provided by the ever-expanding corpus of birch bark texts, which allows for the verification of hypotheses and predictions formulated based on this material.
Evgeniy V. Golovko
Linguistic diversity and language policy: Academic and practical perspectives
Language is a cognitive mechanism that shapes our perception of the world. This viewpoint can be traced back to the works of F. Boas, E. Sapir, and B. Whorf. Language reflects our knowledge of the world and preserves cultural meanings. The disappearance of any language diminishes our understanding of the world and reduces the potential for human knowledge. Research from the past few decades clearly indicates a decline in linguistic diversity. There are approximately seven thousand languages remaining on Earth. Linguists predict that by the end of the century, half of the existing languages may disappear. In this regard, the situation in Russia is no different from the global trend. According to the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, of the slightly more than 150 languages in Russia, at least 15% are on the verge of extinction, and 75% are endangered. My talk will highlight some natural compensatory mechanisms that are slowing down the decline in linguistic diversity, but these mechanisms are insufficient to fully halt the process.
In such a regrettable situation, language policy plays a crucial role. Language policy is part of the overall policy of a state. The state formulates principles for the policy concerning languages spoken within its territory and implements this policy through language planning. The primary objectives of language policy are: a) maintaining linguistic diversity, and b) sustaining a balance of linguistic identities.
The implementation of both objectives is closely tied to an essential property of language: it serves as a means of self-identification. This talk pays special attention to the complexity of the concept of linguistic identity, particularly the fundamental impossibility of applying “objective” methods to define it. Maintaining a balance of identities (including linguistic identities) through language policy is a guarantee of national security and sustainable development. However, every policy (including language policy) has its limitations. It is impossible to arbitrarily impose rules on the use of a language (or languages). It is necessary to consider the specific sociolinguistic situation, history, and previous language planning measures. The talk will provide examples of both successful and failed attempts at implementing language policy in different countries.
In the last decade, more attention has been given to language policy issues in Russia. At the government’s request, academic institutions are involved in developing specific programs, formulating language policy concepts, and implementing various projects. However, even more significant is the emergence of a new trend: activism—a grassroots movement aimed at supporting languages (local elites, public movements, associations, clubs, etc.). This activism takes various forms: competitions concerning one’s knowledge of native languages, KVN (humorous competitions) in native languages, rock bands performing in native languages, and more.
Today, both of the necessary conditions for successful language policy and maintaining linguistic diversity in Russia are present: an active state language policy (a top-down approach) and activism (a bottom-up approach). Only with both of these conditions in place can real results be achieved. Dangers to avoid include: bureaucratization of language teaching (it is not necessary to teach only within the school curriculum), a tendency to dictate (imposing textbooks and teaching methods without considering the actual sociolinguistic situation in a specific region and community), arbitrary bans on educational materials and teaching methods, and restrictions on who can teach, what methods to choose, and what materials to use.
Ayesha Kidwai
From Counting Languages to Counting on Language in India
In this talk, I present a historical perspective of the manner in which the Indian state has dealt with the sometimes-bewildering diversity of languages in (undivided) India. Starting from the colonial period, the talk will begin with outlining the major initiatives—the Census (1881-1901) and the Linguistic Survey of India (1896-1928)—to describe the colonial cartographic and enumerative imagination of how Indian linguistic diversity may be measured and depicted. I will argue that this vision that still informs the manner in which the current Indian state deals with the linguistic diversity of its citizens, even though the Indian Constitution, and the 1961 Census, do represent a significant counterpoint to a continuation of the colonial influence. However, these Constitutional provisions, specifically when implemented through state policy, have failed to introduce an interruption that is powerful enough to protect minority languages from attrition and endangerment. The talk will close with some speculations as to what is to be done to ensure the maintenance of India’s linguistic diversity.
Johanna Nichols
Reconstructing early Siberian areal typology from North American evidence
In my talk, I use linguistic, paleoceanographic, and genetic findings to propose a sequence of four entries from Siberia to North America, typologically differentiated, beginning ~25,000 years ago. I attempt to trace those back to Siberia and posit founding Eurasian linguistic populations with approximate origins. The earliest two, brought to the Americas by maritime hunting and fishing societies, now survive in Asia only at the far periphery, in Melanesia; the third, an inland entry via the ice-free intermontane corridor, is hard to trace because it shows the sociolinguistic effects of sparse and highly mobile inland societies; the fourth survives around the north Pacific Rim of Siberia and North America. (The genealogically traceable Eskimo-Aleut and Dene-Yeniseian entries came later than any of these.) My talk raises three questions about linguistic typological evolution of large populations that are required for further progress:
- Research is just beginning on expected rates of change of this or that typological feature in languages and families; how are these affected by frequencies of supporting features in the larger population? Hypothesis: Features that happen to predominate statistically in the larger population are likely to stabilize with high survival rates in most or all families of the population.
- The same questions for type features (word-order types, alignment types, marking locus types, etc.For both 1) and 2), is there evidence of the relevant frequencies in Eurasia?
- The expected effect of sparse populations and high mobility is decomplexification, chiefly morphosyntactic self-similarity at several levels; are these precursors found in the languages of Asia?
Martin Haspelmath
Why are universals of grammar easier to explain than geographical patterns?
Since the 1920s, geographical patterns of grammatical properties have been discussed occasionally, and since the 1990s, the discussion of large-scale areality has become an important part of comparative linguistics (“areal typology”). This development came a few decades after universals research took off (Greenberg 1963), and nowadays one gets the impression that geographical patterns are studied even more widely than universal patterns. However, linguists seem to lack a good explanatory framework, and there are many puzzles. For example, why are some features strongly areal (e.g. tone, word order), while others show little areality (e.g. gender, future tense)? Geographical patterns are explained by earlier contacts, but the histories of most areal patterns seem obscure. By contrast, grammatical universals are often explainable by functional factors, especially universals of asymmetric coding and universals of word order. Language universals have often been said to be due to diachronic change and thus history as well (e.g. Bybee 1988; Anderson 2016), but in this talk, I will suggest that universals are easier to explain because of their ahistoricity.
References
Anderson S. R. Synchronic versus diachronic explanation and the nature of the Language Faculty. Annual Review of Linguistics. 2016. 2(1). 11–31.
Bybee J. L. The diachronic dimension in explanation. Hawkins J. A. (ed.). Explaining language universals. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 350–379.
Greenberg J. H. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. Greenberg J. H. (ed.). Universals of language. London: MIT Press, 1963. 73–113.
Alan Cienki
How to do things with gestures: Recurrent gestures and their relation to language
Though the study of the gestures people make while talking has a long history, it received a boost in 1992 with the publication of D. McNeill’s book Hand and mind. One effect of this influential volume was that it set up a research method and even an object of research that has been followed by many ever since. This entails having participants retell a cartoon or film that they viewed and then studying how they represent ideas during their narration by depicting them with manual gestures. Meanwhile, a long tradition of researching other (interactive and pragmatic) functions of gestures—developed by scholars like J. Bavelas (1992), E. Grishina (2017), and A. Kendon (1980; 2004)—has continued in a more limited way. However, C. Müller and her colleagues (2014; 2017) turned the tide by focusing on what they called recurrent gestures. They found that, in natural conversations in German, a large portion of speakers’ gestures involve a set of specific forms that serve certain pragmatic and discourse-related functions. Examples include an open hand turned palm up to present an idea or a question, a wavering hand to indicate uncertainty, and making a lateral sweeping motion with the hand when dismissing an idea.
The present talk will consider the importance of this burgeoning area of research. Special attention will be paid to recurrent gestures used by speakers of Russian, based on findings from an ongoing research project. Significantly, it appears that such recurrent gestures constitute the bulk of speakers’ everyday gestural behavior, providing a set of “go to” forms to accomplish functions commonly involved in conversation. One might compare them to the speech acts that J. Austin pointed out in How to do things with words: in a similar way, speakers employ various “gesture acts” and show their stance towards topics via certain recurrent gestures. But just as everyday language users are not normally consciously aware of using speech acts, they are also not consciously aware of most of the recurrent gestures that they use and of the functions that they serve. In closing, we will consider how research on recurrent gestures has potential for application in several domains, including foreign language teaching and learning, as well as the development of more natural, human-like communicative behaviors in virtual agents and robots.
References
Austin J. L. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Bavelas J. B., Chovil N., Lawrie D. A., Wade A. Interactive gestures. Discourse Processes. 1992. 15(4). 469–489.
Bressem J., Müller C. A repertoire of German recurrent gestures with pragmatic functions. Müller C., Cienki A., Fricke E., Ladewig S. H., McNeill D., Bressem J. (eds.). Body – language – communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014. 1575–1592.
Grishina E. A. Russkaja zhestikuljacija s lingvisticheskoj tochki zrenija: Korpusnye issledovania [Russian gesticulation from a linguistic point of view: Corpus studies]. Moscow: Languages of Slavic Culture, 2017.
Kendon A. Gesticulation and speech: Two aspects of the process of utterance. Key M. R. (ed.). The relationship of verbal and nonverbal communication. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1980. 207–227.
Kendon A. Gesture: Visual action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Ladewig S. H. Recurrent gestures. Cienki A. (ed.). The Cambridge handbook of gesture studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 32–55.
McNeill D. Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Müller C. How recurrent gestures mean. Gesture. 2017. 16(2). 276–303.
Baoya Chen
A Rank Method to Tell Homology from Contact: Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Tai
According to our field research, the more core the words, the higher the proportion of vocabulary between cognate languages, and the lower the proportion of vocabulary between contact languages. Based on the hierarchical distribution differences of these core words, there is a homologous relationship between Chinese and Tibeto-Burmese languages, a homologous relationship between Kam-Tai languages and Austronesian languages, and a deep contact relationship between Chinese and Kam-Tai languages. Related to this, the instrumental vocabulary and livestock vocabulary between Chinese and Kam-Tai languages lacked corresponding words during the Stone Age, while a large number of corresponding words appeared during the Bronze Age. Based on the hierarchical distribution differences of these language archaeological vocabulary, it can further prove that there was a profound contact relationship between Chinese and Kam-Tai languages, forming a language alliance. Further research is needed to determine whether there had been a homologous relationship between Chinese and Kam-Tai languages in earlier periods.
References
Benedict, P. K. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus. Cambridge University Press, Berkeley, 1972.
Chen B., He. F. Relativistic rank analysis of kernel consistent corresponding works between Chinese and Kam-Tai. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 2002. 25(1). 195–223.
Chen B., Yu D. On the genetic relationship of Sino-Tibetan languages-Based on rank analsysi of clusters of cultural words and core words. Journal of Chinese linguistics. 2019. 29. 145–223.
Chen B., Li Z. Austric Languages. Wang S. Y., Sun Ch. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 107–120.
Chen B., Li Z., Yu D. Adjustment of the Ranking of Kernel Words in Light of Cases of Language Contact. Peng G., Kong J., Shen Zh., Wang F. (eds.). Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y Wang on his 90th Birthday. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Press, 2023.
Li F. Languages and dialects. Shanghai: The Chinese Year Book, 1937.
Matisoff J. A. Austro-Thai and Sino-Tibetan: an examination of body-part contact relationships. Hashimoto M. J. (ed.). Genetic Relationship, Diffusion, and Typological Similarities of East and Southeast Asian Languages. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1976. 256–289.
Sagart L. Chinese and Austronesian: evidence for a genetic relationship. Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 1993. 21(1). 1–63.
Starostin S. A. On the hypothesis of a genetic connection between the Sino-Tibetan languages and Yeniseian and North-Caucasian languages. Shevoroshkin V. (ed.). Dene-Sino-Caucasian languages: materials from the First International Interdisciplinary Symposium on Language and Prehistory. Bochum: Universtitatsverlag Brockmeyer, 1991.
Juha A. Janhunen
Language spreads in Eurasia: Searching for regularities
After Africa, Eurasia was the second continent of human expansion, starting, for Homo sapiens, perhaps 80-50 kya. Human expansion was accompanied by linguistic expansions, whose mechanisms have always been determined by the constantly changing natural environment and the correspondingly changing cultural adaptations, which, in turn, have regulated population size and mobility patterns. While we know very little of the linguistic map of Pleistocene Eurasia, it is likely that Palaeolithic speech communities were generally too small and population growth too slow to initiate any major linguistic expansion that could have left traces detectable by the comparative method today. It was only the Holocene, with innovations like agriculture and nomadic pastoralism, accompanied by social stratification, that resulted in populations large and dynamic enough to trigger major language spreads.
It is well known that Eurasia, as a whole, has relatively few language families, as compared with the other continents and, in particular, with those rare parts of the world which, like New Guinea, may be assumed to preserve linguistic diversity of a more original scale, once probably common all over the world. The relatively low language-family density of Eurasia is due to the formation and expansion of a few very large and internally diversified language families that have covered the original diversity, remnants of which remain only in marginal areas, including parts of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as mountain regions in the inner parts of the continent. The earliest linguistic expansions detectable today seem to have started in a few mid-Holocene Neolithic societies occupying regions favourable for agriculture, and typically located in fertile plains and river basins. Later expansions exploited the Central Asian latitudinal corridor, combined with longitudinal movements to the north and south. The principal mechanisms of language spread were always diffusion and absorption.
This presentation will take up issues concerning the geographical and chronological parameters that have affected the typology of language spreads in different parts of Eurasia and at different time levels. Several case studies will be discussed with the aim of establishing regularities in the complex prehistory of the linguistic map.