Curt F Woolhiser | Boston College (original) (raw)

Papers by Curt F Woolhiser

Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage, Apr 9, 2022

The last 25 years in Slavic dialectology mark the period not only of JSL’s founding but also of m... more The last 25 years in Slavic dialectology mark the period not only of JSL’s founding but also of major and multiple political, social, and economic reorganizations in predominantly Slavic-speaking states. During this period research institutions and their priorities and projects have both continued and changed; technological innovation has meant moving towards electronic dissemination, “digital humanities,” and innovative modes of presenting research data and findings. In some cases major works (e.g., dialect atlases) have advanced during this period. Moreover, a new generation of scholars has had greater opportunities for mobility and therefore exposure to a variety of linguistic frameworks and approaches, which has fostered cross-border collaboration in the field. The present essay gives an overview of progress made on dialect projects both created institutionally and individually and including both traditional (book, article) and new digital means of dissemination.

In this paper I examine the socio-demographic and linguistic characteristics of nativized varieti... more In this paper I examine the socio-demographic and linguistic characteristics of nativized varieties of Russian in contemporary Belarus, as well as their social evaluation as reflected in various forms of metalinguistic discourse. While Russian is the dominant language in most spheres of both formal and informal communication, there are signs that the form of Russian spoken in Belarus, primarily under the influence of the Belarusian linguistic substratum, is diverging from the norms of the dominant Russian standard of the Russian Federation. At the same time, due to such factors as the influence of the standard language ideology that posits an invariant, unified norm for standard Russian, the absence of any national institutions responsible for codification of “Belarusian Russian,” the continued influence of electronic and print media from Russia, as well as the existence of a distinct standard Belarusian language as a linguistic index of national uniqueness, the recognition of “Belarusian Russian” as a legitimate national variety of Russian, rather than simply a regional deviation from the norm, remains in question.

4 metalinguistic discourses of government spokesmen, members of the political opposition, Belarus... more 4 metalinguistic discourses of government spokesmen, members of the political opposition, Belarusian language activists and members of the scholarly community, as well as of ordinary Belarusian citizens, I will identify a number of recurring discursive patterns that play a crucial role in constructing, in effect, entire speech communities and serve in a variety of ways to legitimise and reproduce the existing language regime in Belarus.

Political borders have long been a central concern of geographers, students of international rela... more Political borders have long been a central concern of geographers, students of international relations, and legal scholars. Since the 1960s, a growing body of sociological and anthropological research has, in addition, provided valuable new insights concerning the ...

Language, Ethnicity and the State, Jan 1, 2001

When East met West: sociolinguistics in the …, Jan 1, 1995

The sociolinguistic study of language contact and bilingualism in the former Soviet Union: The ca... more The sociolinguistic study of language contact and bilingualism in the former Soviet Union: The case of Belarus* Curt Woolhiser 1. Introduction Soviet research in the field of bilingualism and language contact, perhaps the most highly developed branch of sociolinguistics in the ...

Topics in colloquial Russian, Jan 1, 1990

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The language situation in contemporary Belarus is characterized not only by mass Belarusian-Russi... more The language situation in contemporary Belarus is characterized not only by mass Belarusian-Russian bilingualism among the minority Belarusian-speaking segment of the population, but also by a significant division within the Belarusophone community in attitudes toward the literary norm: those whose usage is oriented toward the post-1933 standard (the only form of standard Belarusian officially recognized by the Belarusian government), and those, typically allied with the pro-western anti-Lukashenka opposition, who seek to distance themselves from what they regard as the overly russified language used in the official Belarusian-language media and state educational system.
In this paper I examine the language usage and language attitudes of a numerically small but potentially quite influential segment of contemporary Belarusian society: Belarusophone university students. Employing the “community of practice” model developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), and applied in sociolinguistics by researchers such as Eckert (2000), I show that although there is a considerable range of variation in Belarusophone students’ usage of and attitudes toward the competing variants of standard Belarusian, this variation, when we take into account the students’ participation in specific forms of social engagement, is in many cases entirely predictable and regular. As defined by Wenger (1998), a community of practice is “an aggregate of individuals engaged in negotiating and learning practices that contribute to achieving a common goal.” The community of practice can be defined, and defines itself, with respect to three parameters: 1) what it is “about,” that is, the community's joint enterprise as it is understood and continually renegotiated by its members; 2) how it functions, i.e. the forms of mutual engagement and joint action that bind members together into a cohesive social entity; and 3) the capabilities it has produced, i.e. a shared repertoire of resources (practices, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, discourses, styles, etc.) that members have developed as part of a process of social learning. The concept of “community of practice” provides a more empirically satisfying model of social structure in complex, more mobile modern urban societies than the social network concept employed by sociolinguists such as Milroy (1980), since it focuses more on the content of social interactions, that is, what social networks are “about,” rather than simply keeping track of “who knows whom and in what capacity.”
On the basis of an e-mail survey of 70 Belarusophone students at universities in Belarus conducted in 2004-2005, I sought to test the hypothesis that the most active participants in what I call “oppositional communities of practice” are leading the way in the use of non-codified, innovative forms associated with the independent pro-western Belarusian-language media and younger Belarusophone intelligentsia. The oppositional communities of practice that were the focus of this study included the Association of Belarusian Students (ZBS), Malady Front and similar oppositional organizations, as well as fans of Belarusian-language rock groups (the “Belarusian sound community,” as Survilla (2002) has called them), all groups which define themselves in opposition to the Russocentric and neo-Soviet official Belarusian culture.
The survey included a linguistic questionnaire focusing on variants in the phonological shape of loanwords (e.g. codified standard [plan] ‘plan’ ~ [pl’an]), variants in inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g. hetaha horada ~ hetaha horadu ‘this city (gen. sg.)’, šmat moŭ~ šmat movaŭ ‘many languages’ (gen. pl.), samy tanny bilet ~ najtannejšy bilet ~ najtanny bilet ‘the cheapest ticket’, maladzjožny ~ moladzevy ‘youth’ (adj.) and a number of morphosyntactic and syntactic variables (e.g. kamitet pa spravax moladzi ~ kamitet u spravakh moladzi ‘youth affairs committee’), užyvaemaja zaraz stratehija ~ stratehija, jakaja zaraz užyvaecca ~ užyvanaja zaraz stratehija ‘the strategy currently being employed’, heta novy šljax ~ heta josc' novym šljaxam ‘this is a new way’. Respondents were asked to grade these variants according to the following scale: 1) the variant the respondent uses him or herself and which he/she considers to be correct; 2) an acceptable variant within the standard language; 3) a form that is used by other people, but which the respondent considers to be incorrect; 4) a form that the respondent considers to be impossible in Belarusian.
Respondents were also asked to answer a series of questions concerning their family's language use, language use in different domains, whether or not the respondents’ friendship networks include primarily Belarusian or Russian speakers, degree of exposure to Belarusian-language print and electronic media employing both the official standard and non-codified literary variants associated with the opposition media, degree of participation in Belarusian youth organizations (official vs. oppositional), exposure to Belarusian-language rock music, knowledge of Slavic languages other than Belarusian and Russian, and so on. In addition, I included a series of questions focusing on respondents’ attitudes regarding language and ethnicity and their views as to which nations/ethnic groups are culturally and psychologically closest to the Belarusians (this latter question was included to determine which external reference groups Belarusian students tend to identify with most).
For each informant, I calculated an index based on level of participation in oppositional communities of practice and commitment to the core values of the nationalist opposition (i.e. tendency to consider language an essential marker of national identity, tendency to view Belarusians as more like Central or West Europeans than the Russians). I then divided the responses into three groups: those with the highest scores for participation in oppositional communities of practice and oppositional values, those with average scores, and those with the lowest scores. I then produced aggregate scores for each of the linguistic variables for each of the three groups.
Analysis of the data shows that, as I hypothesized, the students with the highest scores for “oppositionality” show the strongest preference for innovative forms, while those with the lowest scores adhere more closely to the norms of the post-1933 codified standard (forms that are also, for the most part, linguistically closer to Russian). Those with average scores for oppositionality show the highest degree of variation, in some cases preferring the innovative variants, and in other cases remaining more conservative. Another interesting finding is that the individuals occupying the most extreme positions on the continuum of oppositionality show the most extreme evaluations of the competing variants: a higher percentage of those with high oppositionality indices regard the post-1933 standard variants as “incorrect” or “non-Belarusian,” while those with the lowest oppositionality scores show the strongest tendency to characterize the non-codified variants in the same way.
Belarusian language use among Belarusian university students thus represents a continuum, from the “hard core,” consciously Belarusian-dominant speakers, who use the language in all or most social contexts and whose language use is intimately tied to specific oppositional practices and discourses, to the Russian-dominant “casual users,” among whom there is a relatively low level of commitment to the use of Belarusian as an overt political and cultural statement. The “in-betweens,” whose language, though influenced to some extent by the recent innovations in literary usage, reflects the continued influence of the Soviet-era codified standard, show sympathy for oppositional cultural models as reflected in their patterns of media consumption, but are not full participants in the associated communities of practice.
While traditional variationist sociolinguistics tends to disregard speakers’ conscious manipulation of linguistic variables as representing a less authentic, less natural form of language, in studying Belarusophone student subcultures specifically as communities of practice, we must be sensitive to the role the innovative variants play in the affirmation of group membership and status within the group, that is, their function as a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991). Viewed at the level of individual language use, such variation also plays a key role in the expression of individual positionality, or stancetaking, which has recently emerged as a central concern in research in interactional sociolinguistics (Jaffe 2009). As argued by Coulmas (2005), a focus on speaker agency, as expressed in the socially-motivated choices that speakers make from the linguistic options available to them, helps to shed new light on the problems of language variation and change that are at the heart of the sociolinguistic enterprise.

REFERENCES

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bucholtz, Mary (2003). Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity (Dialogue: Sociolinguistics and authenticity: An elephant in the room). Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (3), 398-416.

Coulmas, Florian (2005). Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers' Choices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eckert, Penelope (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.) (2009). Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal (2000). Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities.Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 35-84.

Labov, William (2001). Principles of Lingu...

Books by Curt F Woolhiser

This dissertation examines contact innovations in the coterritorial Polish and Belarusian dialect... more This dissertation examines contact innovations in the coterritorial Polish and Belarusian dialects of the Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands in the light of proposals by van Coetsem (1988, 1995, 1997), Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and Thomason (1998) concerning the typology of linguistic transfer in language contact. These authors argue that in place of Weinreich's (1953) generalized notion of "interference," it is necessary to draw a distinction between two different processes whereby linguistic material is transferred between languages in contact: 1) borrowing, the transfer of foreign features into a language by native speakers of that language ("recipient language agentivity," in van Coetsem's terminology); and 2) interference/ imposition through language shift ("source language agentivity"), which involves the transfer of features into a language by non-native speakers. Crucially, van Coetsem and Thomason and Kaufman assert, the two transfer types are associated with distinct patterns of innovation affecting different levels of linguistic structure. Thus, borrowing will tend to affect the least stable linguistic domains (primarily the lexicon), while interference/imposition will initially affect the more stable domains, such as phonological rules, syntactic structure, and inflectional morphology (the latter primarily via simplification). A blurring of the distinction between the two transfer types occurs only in the case of "neutralization" (van Coetsem 1997), which typically occurs when a bilingual community undergoes a shift in linguistic dominance (as reflected, for example, in what Myers-Scotton (1998) calls "matrix language turnover"), resulting in imposition-like phenomena in the community's increasingly obsolescent or functionally restricted original language.
On the basis of a comparative analysis of previously published dialect data, as well as my own field recordings from the Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian border region, in this study I provide evidence that the distinction between the two transfer types is applicable not only in the case of genetically and typologically divergent systems, but also, to a large extent, in the case of contact between closely-related language varieties such as dialects of Belarusian and Polish. Thus, we find that Polish influence in the majority of the Belarusian dialects of the region is mainly limited to the lexicon, derivational morphology and certain lexically-based syntactic phenomena such as verbal and prepositional case government, while the Polish dialects which arose on a Belarusian or mixed Lithuanian-Belarusian substratum exhibit far more profound structural modifications, including freer stress, vowel reduction, the absence of clitic pronouns and of personal inflection in the past tense, copula deletion, and other phonological, morphological and syntactic features typically associated with East Slavic.
The linguistic evidence for two distinct types of transfer in the evolution of these dialects is supported by the socio-cultural history of the Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands, which suggests that the predominant source of Polish influence in the Belarusian dialects of the region was borrowing by native speakers of Belarusian, while the Polish folk dialects of the northern borderlands arose largely through shift by speakers of Belarusian and/or Lithuanian dialects to a regional Polish interdialect rather than as the result of large-scale migrations from the original Polish ethnolinguistic territory.
These findings support the thesis that in language contact it is not, as Jakobson and others have argued, the inherent "developmental tendencies" of the systems involved which primarily determine the linguistic outcomes, but rather the types of linguistic transfer (borrowing vs. interference/imposition). The two transfer types are, in turn, a result of the interplay of linguistic, social and psychological factors, including social dominance (the relative prestige of the language varieties in contact), functional dominance (the relative frequency and domains of their use), and psycholinguistic dominance (i.e. which of the varieties is acquired earlier and is the matrix language in conversational code-switching).
In addition to providing empirical corroboration for theories of contact-induced language change which differentiate between the linguistic consequences of borrowing under conditions of language maintenance and interference/imposition through language shift, this study offers valuable insights concerning the mechanisms and typology of linguistic transfer in contact situations involving closely-related language varieties as opposed to linguistically more divergent systems. The discussion of cognate languages draws upon research in the field of dialect contact (Trudgill 1986, Kerswill 1994), focusing on the question of the types of linguistic knowledge L2 learners of closely-related languages rely on in the process of language acquisition, and how these processes resemble or differ from acquisition of more distantly related or unrelated languages. Of particular theoretical importance is the evidence concerning rule typology and the potential for transfer via imposition in cognate language contact, which provides support for approaches such as Natural Phonology (Stampe 1969, Donegan and Stampe 1979), while refuting a number of predictions made by scholars working within the framework of Lexical Phonology and related approaches.

Border Studies by Curt F Woolhiser

Political borders have not figured prominently in dialect geography, which as a discipline develo... more Political borders have not figured prominently in dialect geography, which as a discipline developed in lockstep with the formation of European nation states. Dialect geography was therefore influenced by 19 th-century nationalism and, in turn, 19 th-century perceptions of nationality influenced dialectology and its perception of what constitutes "a language". If considered at all, dialect geography has, by and large, ruled out political borders as linguistically interesting.