Dialect variation and language contact in Udmurt
Udmurt is one of the largest minority Uralic languages spoken in Russia. Since it was only standardized relatively recently, there is significant dialectal variation inside Udmurt, which is visible in the vocabulary as well as on all levels of grammar.
While phonetics and vocabulary of the dialects, as well as certain morphological forms, have been described pretty well, the same cannot be said about most levels of grammar, such as grammatical semantics, syntax and information structure. One important dimension in which dialectal variation could be explored is language contact. Udmurt has been in contact with Russian for several centuries and with Turkic languages, Tatar and Bashkir, for almost a millennium. Some of the dialects have been affected more than others, and presumably many differences between dialects could be at least partially explained by the contacts they have had.
My project aims at the description of a number of specific grammatical constructions and phenomena, which have not been extensively studied across Udmurt dialects. After describing these phenomena and dialectal differences between them, my main goal is to explain how they appeared and whether language contact was likely to play any role in it. Special attention will be paid to the Beserman dialect, which combines traits of Northern and Southern dialectal groups, and which I have researched since 2012. Methodologically, the project will be data-driven. It will be based on fieldwork (5 field trips are planned) and on linguistic corpora, some of which already exist and some will be collected during the fieldwork. All corpora collected in the course of the project will be released and could be reused in other research on Udmurt.