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Vowel variation in the Belarusian vernacular. Comments on T. R. Ramza [2011] and an instrumental-phonetic study on the Belarusian ‘jakanne’

Варьирование гласных в белорусском разговорном языке. Комментарии к монографии Т. Р. Рамзы [2011], а также инструментально-фонетическое исследование белорусского яканья

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Abstract

Belarusian vernacular is a phenomenon that is clearly marked in the linguistic landscape of Belarus. It is also rarely studied. T. R. Ramza’s book Belaruskae hutarkovae maŭlenne: sučasny stan ‘Belarusian colloquial speech: the current state’, that is the subject of the review part of this paper, deserves great credit for not only being the first example of an empirical investigation of this ‘current state’ of the Belarusian vernacular, but also for enabling further studies in this field. The second part of this paper can be seen as an example of this, dealing with vowel variation in certain unstressed syllables in the Belarusian vernacular. By means of an instrumental investigation based on T. R. Ramza’s data it will be shown that these vowel realizations sometimes differ from the orthoepic norms of Belarusian.

Аннотация

Белорусский разговорный язык в языковом ландшафте Беларуси является маркированным. Кроме того, он практически не исследован. Большая заслуга монографии Т. Р. Рамзы Беларускае гутарковае маўленне: сучасны стан (представленной во вводной части данной статьи) не только в том, что она является первым примером эмпирического исследования современного состояния белорусского разговорного языка, а также в том, что она делает возможным его дальнейшее исследование. Пример такого исследования представлен во второй части данной статьи, предметом рассмотрения которой является вариация гласных в определенных безударных слогах. Инструментальные методы анализа данных Т. Р. Рамзы позволяют показать, что артикуляция гласных может отличаться от орфоэпических норм белорусского языка.

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Notes

  1. Minsk: Vyšėjšaja škola. 221 s. + ėlektr. apt. dysk: huk. ISBN 978-985-06-2054-5.

  2. Cf. for example Sjameška (1998, p. 38): “Katastrafičnae zvužėnne kamunikatyŭnyx funkcyj belaruskaj movy ne dalo mahčymasci razvic’ ahul’nanarodnuju hutarkovuju formu nacyjanal’naj litaraturnaj movy, pad jakoj zvyčajna razumeecca vusnaja maŭlenčaja praktyka adukavanaj častki hramadstva i jakaja ličycca prėstyžnaj sacyjal’na-stylistyčnaj raznavidnascju nacyjanal’naj movy” ‘The disastrous narrowing of the communicative functions of Belarusian prevented the development of a generally accepted colloquial form of the national standard language, which usually refers to the oral speech practice of the educated part of society, and which is considered as the prestigious social-stylistic form of the national language’.

  3. R. refers to Belarusian–Russian mixed speech (known as trasjanka, cf. Hentschel 2008, 2013) and mixed dialects of the Belarusian borderlands (cf. Smułkowa 2002).

  4. The emphasis on the Belarusian ‘strong’ jakanne (see Sect. 3.1) is characteristic of this tendency.

  5. For example: “Vse naši velikie ,belaruskamoŭnyja dzejačy‘ […] s rodnymi po telefonu obščajutsja na russkom jazyke. […] V takoj situacii možno skazat’: ‘Otpustite jazyk, dajte emu svobodu spokojno umeret’ bez ėtix nasil’stvennyx dejstvij’ ” ‘All our great ‘Belarusian-spoken personalities’ [the phrase in single quotes is in Belarusian, the rest of the utterance in Russian, JPZ] talk to their families on the phone in Russian. […] In such a situation one can say: ‘Let the language go, give it the freedom to die in peace without these forced activities.” (Ljubov’ Levšun: U belorusov est’ konstitucionnoe pravo govorit’ na svoem rodnom russkom jazyke. Vernyj Narod, 19.03.2012 [http://14vn.com/index.php?news=157, last accessed 01/13/2013]).

  6. The terms ‘akanne’ and ‘jakanne’ are sometimes used as oppositional, the former referring to vowel neutralization after non-palatalized consonants. Sometimes ‘akanne’ is used as the hypernym for both ‘akanne’ in a narrower sense and ‘jakanne’, covering Belarusian vowel neutralization in general, independent of the preceding consonant.

  7. These are the north-eastern dialects of Belarusian. /a/, /e/ and /o/ after palatalized consonants before stressed /a/, in some regions also before stressed /e/, are realized as an [i]-like sound (cf. Vajtovič 1968, pp. 56–63).

  8. In Belarusian, unstressed syllables are up to 2.5 times shorter than stressed ones (Burlyka et al. 1989, p. 318).

  9. Version 5.3.22 (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/).

  10. This includes the personal pronouns jana ‘she’, jano ‘it’, jany ‘they’, in spite of the fact that diachronically these are cases of an akanne + morphologically motivated prothetic /j/. Synchronically, these cases do not differ from ‘true’ instances of jakanne.

  11. It should also be mentioned that prestressed vowels were not always realized at all.

  12. Regression analyses were also carried out with the second formant F2 as the dependent variable, but as there were no significant results, I will concentrate on the first formant (corresponding to vowel height) here.

  13. See the column Coefficient in the tables. The mean F1 of prestressed vowels and the coefficients do not add up to the mean F1 of stressed and weakly stressed vowels respectively, because the (not significant) effect of duration is still included in the model.

  14. On the other hand this also may be a side effect of the definition of weakly stressed vowels used here. Function words surely may have in some cases more, in some cases less communicative weight.

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  1. Institut für Slavistik, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

    Jan Patrick Zeller

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Zeller, J.P. Vowel variation in the Belarusian vernacular. Comments on T. R. Ramza [2011] and an instrumental-phonetic study on the Belarusian ‘jakanne’. Russ Linguist 37, 193–207 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-013-9112-z

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