Monday, January 31, 3pm, Karen Landahl Center conference room

Odessan Russian: Reconstructing variation

Abstract:

Odessan Russian (OdR) is a contact variety of Russian which emerged with massive immigration into the region which is currently Odessa, officially founded in 1794 under Catherine the Great. It was spoken in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century by some but not all segments of the population; since WW II it has been in steady decline and is now an endangered dialect.  In the present paper I provide a brief sketch of the key linguistic features of OdR which distinguish it from Standard Russian and then turn to the reconstruction of variation based on existing published resources and my own fieldwork in summer 2010 in Brighton Beach.

OdR differs from regional varieties of Russian specifically as a contact variety, with substrate influences from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish. The impact of contact can be seen in all linguistic levels (phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactic) in Odessan Russian. It also shows borrowing, primarily lexical, from other contact languages, including French, Greek and Turkic.

Linguistic documentation of Odessan Russian is scant, with a dictionary (Dolopchev 1909) being one of the earliest sources; otherwise, most of the documentation consists of use of the variety in literary, fictional texts, a few songs, and some humorous but unreliable pseudo-lexicons. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps due to its low prestige, this variety is understudied, with Stepanov (2004) one of the few serious analyses. Reconstruction of OdR as actually spoken in the early 20th century is largely dependent on fictional works due to the lack of any other (See also Poussa 1999 for similar arguments.) Today OdR is an endangered dialect and is most robustly spoken in Brighton Beach, NY (and perhaps Israel); the variety currently spoken in Odessa differs greatly, due to significant Ukrainian immigration into the city.