The emergence of Finnish-Estonian bilingual constructions in two contact settings

Authors

  • Helka Riionheimo University of Eastern Finland Author
  • Maria Frick University of Oulu Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v8i3.14262

Keywords:

emergence, bilingual constructions, crosslinguistic influence, linguistic borrowing, code-switching, language contact

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the emergence of bilingual constructions in conversational data from two groups of first generation Finns living in Estonia: 1) students and migrant workers who had been living in Estonia 0–17 years at the time the data was collected between 2002 and 2011; and 2) Ingrian Finns, who migrated to Soviet Estonia around World War II and had been living in the country for more than 50 years at the time of recording in the 1990s. All the participants in the current study use resources from Finnish and Estonian, and in both sets of data, there is co-occurrence of elements from both, but the language mixing patterns are very different. While some language mixing such as in the students' and workers' speech is predictable in this kind of contact setting, the immigrants from the Soviet era show signs of severe language attrition that is not typically found among first generation speakers. Among the recent immigrants, Estonian influence on Finnish morphology and morphosyntax is occasional whereas in the case of the Ingrian Finns, language mixing often occurs throughout the conversation and involves blending of morphological and syntactic constructions from both languages. Recurrent blending of certain constructions from the two languages especially in the Ingrian Finnish data indicates a dynamic towards establishing a new bilingual grammar. Furthermore, the comparison of the two datasets shows the effect that social factors and the length of stay have on first generation immigrants' language.

Author Biographies

  • Helka Riionheimo, University of Eastern Finland
    Helka Riionheimo, PhD, is a university lecturer in Finnish language at the University of Eastern Finland. Her current research areas are language contacts (especially contacts between Finnic languages), attrition, Finnish dialects, morphological complexity and dialect syntax. She led a post-doctoral project ‘Complexity in contact: The maintenance of morphophonology in Baltic Finnic contacts’, funded by the Academy of Finland, 2010–2013, and has been in charge of the project ‘CROSSLING: Language contacts at the crossroads of disciplines’, funded by the Kone Foundation, 2011–2014. She published, in Finland in 2007, a monograph about the contact of Ingrian Finnish and Estonian, and recently she has explored the morphological intermingling of these two languages in the article ‘Multiple roots of innovations’ (Studies in Language 37[3], 2013) and the occurrences of code-switches in her data in the article ‘Bilingual voicing: A study of code-switching in the reported speech of Finnish immigrants in Estonia’ (Multilingua 32[5], 2013, together with Maria Frick).
  • Maria Frick, University of Oulu
    Maria Frick, PhD, is university lecturer in Finnish and Estonian language at the University of Oulu. Her current research interests fall mainly in the field of interactional linguistics and include multilingual interaction – especially codeswitching between Finnish and Estonian, multimodality in mundane face-to-face conversations and action formation in interaction. Frick was part of the FiDiPro project ‘Grammar and interaction: The linking of actions in speech and writing’ (University of Helsinki, 2009–2013), and is currently part of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction (University of Helsinki, 2012–2017) as well as the project Multilingual Practices (University of Helsinki, 2014–2016).

Published

2015-05-11

How to Cite

Riionheimo, H., & Frick, M. (2015). The emergence of Finnish-Estonian bilingual constructions in two contact settings. Sociolinguistic Studies, 8(3), 409–447. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v8i3.14262