ИСТИНА

FLUENT SPEAKERS AND SEMI-SPEAKERS OF AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE. DESCRIBING LANGUAGE PROFILES In this presentation I am going to show the relationship between language variants spoken in the same community, using an example of the village of Gammalsvenskby, where I did field research. The absence of uniformity in linguistic competence of speakers is a typical feature of endangered languages. The main groups are fluent speakers, semi-speakers, terminal speakers [Grinevald, Bert 2011]. A description of only the language of the fluent speakers does not make a “full picture” because there is a range of variants of the dialect which are considerably different. One of the main features of semi-speakers is significant variation in inflexion, cf. [Palosaari, Campbell 2011]. Variation in inflexion means that when inflected forms have in the same position such affixes that are not clearly predictable in synchrony, these affixes can be attached to any stem. In other words, when the same grammatical meaning is expressed by more than one affix, the affixes are used ignoring historically determined rules of their distribution. For example, when the plural is expressed by a number of endings, in the speech of semi-speakers these endings occur with any noun, regardless of historical declension types. The extreme case is a situation when, for example, any plural ending can be freely attached to any noun stem. This shows that together with the knowledge of stems and affixes there is another important component in the grammar of fluent speakers, i.e. the knowledge of historically conditioned patterns in the distribution of affixes. The semi-speakers may know “words” and “endings”, but, unlike fluent speakers, the link between the words and endings is lost. This increases the number of word forms occurring in interviews with semi-speakers. However, this concerns only those affixes which express the same grammatical sense, e.g. an ending of the preterite cannot normally participate in the variation of endings of the present. In my presentation I will describe these features using relevant examples and will discuss their role in language change.