Morphosyntactic Change: The Impact of Russian on Evenki

Abstract

Evenki is a Tungusic language spoken throughout Siberia. Russian-Evenki contact dates back several centuries, and the Evenki people have long-standing contact with a number other groups of people as well, including Yakuts, Buryats and other Tungus people. Throughout their history, Evenki have often been bior multilingual, yet language loss is currently occurring at a rapid rate, with at least 2/3 of the population speaking a language other than Evenki: Bulatova (1994) estimates a total population of under 30,000, with less than 9000 speakers. This paper discusses the linguistic impact of Russian on the Evenki language, focusing on morphosyntactic changes, as these have received less attention in the linguistic literature than have phonological changes. Findings are based primarily on my own fieldwork in the Amur basin and Sakha (Yakutia), supplemented by published descriptions.1 The Evenki language is characterized by widespread dialectical variation, and 51 distinct dialects have been identified.2 These are traditionally divided into three major dialect groups on the basis of the distribution of [s]/[h]: the Southern group, which shows phonetic [s] both word-initially and internally; Northern group, with [h] word-initially and internally; and the Eastern group, with [s] word-initially and [h] intervocalic position. These dialects show not only phonetic and lexical differences, but also morphosyntactic ones, including differences in the number of cases, the possessive pronouns, and in verbal morphology (see Atkine 1997 for a brief summary). The present paper focuses on changes occurring in several of the Eastern dialects; conclusions are based on work with speakers from the villages of Bomnak, Pervomayskoye, and Ust'Nyukzha (Amurskaya Oblast') and the village of Iyengra (Sakha, Yakutia), and may not be true of all other dialects. Recent work on other dialects, such as Nedjalkov (1997), together with anecdotal kinds of evidence supplied by natives