Self-conscious realism: metafiction and the nineteenth-century Russian novel

Abstract

done the volume better justice if they had been more careful with the above-mentioned ideological questions in the volume title and introduction. Despite its focus on only one post-Soviet country, the range of languages studied in the papers with regard to their contact with Russian is truly broad: Ugro-Finnic, Uralic, Turkic, Caucasian, and Sinitic (Chinese) – most of them being minority and indigenous languages of Russia. In addition, several studies explore the influence of languages spoken in countries neighbouring Russia (such as Georgian and Azerbaijani) on languages of Russia’s border regions. This is a valuable addition to a volume that, according to its back cover, “investigates the impact of Russian” alone. It would have been beneficial if more donor languages along with Russian had been considered for comparative analysis, especially as the authors claim to focus on the whole of the former Soviet Union. The editors themselves suggest that, if the focus of research is Slavicization, it would be useful to add other Slavic languages for comparison (283). The themes discussed in the chapters include phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse consequences of language contact as well as such sociolinguistic questions as language ideologies, language policy and planning, language maintenance, and standardization. Language contact and change are examined through a wide array of methods, such as wordlist and text analysis, elicitation tasks, grammaticality judgements on test sentences, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. Another noteworthy characteristic of the volume is how the discussion of significant sociolinguistic issues is woven into the book fabric. All studies provide an extensive summary of historical and social processes that have led to the current sociolinguistic landscape of the described regions. In their discussion of study results, the papers discern important connections between differences in the linguistic outcomes of language contact and varying sociolinguistic circumstances, opening new avenues for research. A number of studies point to the problem of certain minority language speakers in Russia having no access to native language classes as a result of recent language policy changes, by which the study of minority languages at schools has become “optional.” This is one of the driving forces of language change, the consequences of which are presented by the volume’s chapters. Such publications are an important contribution to debates on questions of language policy and planning in Russia. Therefore, the volume may be of interest not only to scholars researching language contact in Russia, but also to language policy practitioners – as well as to lay people eager to learn more about the social and cultural diversity of Russia, its various regions, and its languages.