Studies in Slavic, Baltic, and Eastern European Languages and Cultures – Serie

The dual number in Slavic has always puzzled linguists. While some Slavic languages, such as Slovenian, have three distinct categories of number--singular (1), dual (2), and plural (3 or more) –other Slavic languages, such as Russian, have no dual number. Considering that all Slavic languages have evolved from a common Proto Slavic language, it is puzzling that there is such a difference in the category of number. In The Evolution of the Slavic Dual: A Biolinguistic Perspective, with the aid of tools from biolinguistics, Tatyana G. Slobodchikoff develops a new theory of Morphosyntactic Feature Economy within the distributed morphology framework. Using newly digitized corpora of Old East Slavic, Old Slovenian, and Old Sorbian manuscripts spanning from the eleventh century through the present time, this book presents a thorough analysis of the evolution of dual number in Slavic languages.

Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late-Habsburg Lviv makes the case for a two-pronged approach to past urban multilingualism in East-Central Europe, one that considers both historical and linguistic features. Based on archival materials from late-Habsburg Lemberg––now Lviv in western Ukraine––the author examines its workings in day-to-day life in the streets, shops, and homes of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The places where the city’s Polish-Ukrainian-Yiddish-German encounters took place produced a distinct urban dialect. A variety of south-eastern “borderland” Polish, it was subject to strong ongoing Ukrainian as well as Yiddish and German influence. Jan Fellerer analyzes its main morpho-syntactic features with reference to diverse written and recorded sources of the time. This approach represents a departure from many other studies that focus on the phonetics and inflectional morphology of Slavic dialects. Fellerer argues that contact-induced linguistic change is contingent on the historical specifics of the contact setting. The close-knit urban community of historical Lviv and its dialect provide a rich interdisciplinary case study.

Ivan N. Petrov’s The Development of the Bulgarian Literary Language: From Incunabula to First Grammars, Late Fifteenth–Early Seventeenth Century examines the history of the first printed Cyrillic books and their role in the development of the Bulgarian literary language. In the literary culture of the Southern Slavs, especially the Bulgarians, the period that began at the end of the fifteenth century and covered the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is often seen as a foreshadowing of the pre-national era of modern times. In particular, the centuries-old manuscript tradition was gradually replaced by the Cyrillic printed book, which—after the incunabula of Krakow and Montenegro—was published in such centers as Târgovi?te, Prague, Venice, Serbian monasteries, Vilnius, Moscow, Zabludów, Lviv, Ostroh, and many others. Petrov shows how the study of old Slavic prints is closely linked to the processes that determined the emergence of modern literary languages in the Slavia Orthodoxa area, including the influence of the liturgical Church Slavonic language shared by the Orthodox Slavs, which was increasingly standardized and codified at that time. The perspective of a language historian brings new light to the complex and multidimensional issues of this important transitional period of Slavic history and culture.

The Old Prussian language has always puzzled linguists. While other Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, have remained in use to the present day, Old Prussian was extinguished at the beginning of eighteenth century, and the extant Old Prussian linguistic corpus is quite limited in scope. Drawing on two bilingual vocabularies and three Lutheran Catechisms (as well as onomastic evidence and several other minor texts), this work critically explores the linguistic and historiographical contours of Old Prussian.

This book presents a contemporary, primarily synchronic, linguistic analysis of the essential dialectal features characterizing the dialects spoken in the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Russian border area. Utilizing sociolinguistic and unique focus-group data, Salvatore Del Gaudio analyzes specific local dialects at the crossroads of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation, both locally and cross-regionally, to best highlight stable characteristics and ongoing tendencies over the span of a decade (2012–2022). The individuality of this area is also examined within a broader sociolinguistic context, which accounts for language attitudes, habits, and the identity of local speakers, as well as the linguistic landscape of the border area. The findings presented in this book are valuable for further dialectological research and related linguistic subfields. Moreover, they contribute to the establishment of a more accurate typology of (East) Slavic languages, offering valid insights into areal linguistics, as is often required in similar studies.

Montenegrin dialects have long been treated as part of the Serbian or Serbo-Croatian language in traditionalist dialectology. Even though they are among the best studied dialects of Slavic languages, this is the first monograph offering a synthesis of Montenegrin dialects. In Dialectology of the Montenegrin Language, Adnan Cirgic addresses them as a compact unit, mostly corresponding to Montenegrin state borders, with isoglosses that cross those borders—much like the behavior of dialects in general. Cirgic brings a different approach to classifying Montenegrin dialects, free from the ideological shackles imposed by unitarian language policy in the former Yugoslav federation, which included Montenegro as one of its constituent members. In addition to classifying Montenegrin dialects and summarizing features of individual dialects and speech groups, this book also presents a comprehensive history of research on those dialects since the nineteenth century, along with an exhaustive dialectological bibliography of Montenegro.

The Russian language has evolved into a lingua franca in post-Soviet immigrant communities, prompting an analysis of its use in different domains. Everyday Linguistic and Cultural Practices of the Russophone Diaspora explores the language maintenance of Russian abroad, emphasizing the role of educational ventures and transnational communications facilitated by the internet. This book researches specific aspects of migrant life, including occupational practices, homemaking, family dynamics, cultural engagement, and linguistic hybridity, and makes use of extensive empirical data spanning Soviet, post-Soviet, and non-Soviet migrant generations collected from European, North American, and Asian communities. Relations between different migration waves are not always friendly, but are mediated through online discussion forums, which help to foster mutual understanding. Like all migrants, Russophones seek better opportunities by establishing new homes, revealing intergenerational differences in lifestyle and adaptation. This volume focuses on the emigration waves between 1990 and 2020, and points to shifts in values and migration expectations and reflecting on the evolution of diasporic communities and the dynamic adaptation of the Russian language.