Abstract
In this article, the author examines the categorization of three closely related Finnic minority languages: Votic, Ingrian and Finnish located southwest of St. Petersburg, as well as the loyalty of the native speakers towards their mother tongues, based on material from her own sociolinguistic surveys. The comparison revealed that speakers of different languages exhibit different attitudes toward their native language, despite almost identical conditions for the existence of these languages.
The work is supported by RFBR, grant n° 15-24-09001.
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Notes
- 1.
Another name is Izhorians.
- 2.
Or Izhorian.
- 3.
Cf.: “For characteristics of verbal communication in a linguistically heterogeneous environment it is important whether the languages which are used in the environment are genetically closely related: in the case of their close relationship the their mutual interference is manifested more intensely and deeply than in the case of the genetic distance of languages. There are mainly psychological reasons behind it: speakers of closely related languages realize their differences less than speakers of languages which are genetically more distant from each other. [...] The factor of “typological similarities / differences of languages” is also significant, in this case it can be considered in conjunction with the factor of genetic proximity of languages. Grammatical system similarity facilitates the language switching (active bilingualism), while significant differences in grammar can impede this transition” (Krysin 2000:153).
- 4.
The school education in Standard Finnish in Finland began much later, in 1858. So the dialect of Ingrian Finns is quite different from standard Finnish spoken in Finland. Since there are two literary norms, in fact, they have to be considered as two separate closely related languages.
- 5.
Almost all the speakers of these languages were interviewed, due to their small number; the selective sampling should be close to 100%, because the smaller number of speakers of a given language is the greater percentage of each of them (for more details see Agranat 2007: 127).
- 6.
Table numbers do not correspond to the numbers of questions in the questionnaire, because the respondents’ answers to some of the questions presented in the article are not in tabular form.
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Agranat, T. (2019). The Categorization of the Languages in Ingria and the Language Loyalty of their Native Speakers. In: Moskvitcheva, S., Viaut, A. (eds) Minority Languages from Western Europe and Russia. Language Policy, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24340-1_6
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