Evidence of syntactic convergence among Russian–Sakha bilinguals
Evidence of syntactic convergence among Russian–Sakha bilinguals

Summary/Abstract: This paper illustrates the implementation of two basic experiments to test word order changes in Russian and Sakha, languages in long–standing contact. We hypothesize that changes in word order may correlate with deeper structural changes and language shift. The experiments show that some speakers are shifting from Sakha to Russian: 4 from a sample of 30 speakers could not produce texts in Sakha, and one third of the sample produced sentences with some errors. At the same time, there were a significant number of mistakes in the Russian production experiments, indicating interference from Sakha and/or imperfect learning. A sociolinguistic questionnaire showed a high level of accuracy between speakers’ self–assessment of their proficiency in each of the target languages as measured by the experiments shown here. Moreover, the simple experiments themselves revealed a number of other production errors and proved to be a reasonable indicator of less than fluent proficiency and of at least the initial stages of language shift.

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