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

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.