Diversification in time and space and how it is perceived: Applying a folk linguistic listening task with Tver’ Karelians

In this article we apply a folk linguistic listening task to examine how the Tver’ Karelians in Russia recognise a sample of their own dialect and a sample of Border Karelian (spoken in Finland), both recorded about 60 years ago. Tver’ Karelian and Border Karelian have a shared origin in Proto-Karel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNordic journal of linguistics Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 186 - 214
Main Authors Palander, Marjatta, Riionheimo, Helka
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.10.2023
Subjects
Accentuation
Dialects
Finnish language
Folk linguistics
Karelian
Linguistics
Listening
Migration
Minority languages
Phonetic features
Russian language
Finland
Russia
folk linguistics
Border Karelian
minority language
language awareness
recognition task
Karelian
Tver’ Karelian
Finnic languages
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Summary:In this article we apply a folk linguistic listening task to examine how the Tver’ Karelians in Russia recognise a sample of their own dialect and a sample of Border Karelian (spoken in Finland), both recorded about 60 years ago. Tver’ Karelian and Border Karelian have a shared origin in Proto-Karelian but have been diverging from each other since the seventeenth century; the former has had strong influence from Russian and the latter from Finnish. The study investigates the Tver’ Karelians’ awareness of and observations about the Karelian language and shows that they easily recognise their own dialect, whereas the Border Karelian sample is harder to recognise and describe. However, the respondents observed and described lexical and phonetic features of this sample, and two thirds of them located the sample in the republic of Karelia or in Finland, mostly based on the ‘accent’ of the speaker.
ISSN:0332-5865
1502-4717
DOI:10.1017/S0332586523000070