Alexander Yu. Rusakov, St. Petersburg State University
Tsitsipis, Lukas D. (1998) A Linguistic Anthropology of Praxis
and Language Shift: Arvanнtika (Albanian) and Greek in Contact,
Oxford University Press, xii+163pp, hardback ISBN 0-19-823731-6,
Oxford Studies in Language Contact.i
Overview
The book is devoted to the problems of language shift on the example of
Arvanítika, a variety of Tosk Albanian spoken in Greece for more than four
centuries" (1). The material for the study was gathered through a fieldwork in two
Albanian-speaking communities – Kiriáki in Biotia and Spáta near Athens. The
basic concern of the author is, however, theoretical – he aims at revealing the
patterns of correlation between language shift and a number of sociolinguistic,
pragmatic, ethno-historical and ideological factors; in this respect, the views of
Nancy Dorian and Susanne Hill are explicitly acknowledged as theoretically
crucial for the author. Along with the theoretical issues, the very linguistic data are
definitely of great interest – although Arvanítika has been linguistically studied for
more than 150, and a number of renowned linguists have contributed to that study
(Reinhold 1855; Meyer 1896; Weigand 1926; Phourikis 1932-33; Haebler 1965;
Hamp 1961; et al.; from sociolinguistic point of view: Trudgill 1978; Trudgill &
Tzavaras 1977), Arvanítika is not yet adequately described in all its versatility, and
there is a visible shortage of available dialectal texts, and contemporary ones in the
first place. However, this dialect is crucial for the understanding of some processes
in the history of Albanian in general (Hamp 1961 et al.; Joseph 1999). In this
respect, the book under review is not only useful for the study of sociolinguistics,
language contacts and linguistic ecology, it is also interesting for the specialists in
Albanian and – more generally – Balkan linguistics.
The book is based on a number of previous articles by the author. It consists of
seven chapters.
1. Introduction: Theoretical Discussions and Research Focus (1-7). This chapter
contains an introduction of those theoretical concepts, that are relevant for the
whole investigation. This are, first of all, societal praxis, that is, the sphere in
which a language is functioning. With respect to this notion, the author indicates
that "after a language has made its way to obsolescence with regard to its
referential adequacy, other functions, pragmatic in nature, remain" (3, cf. Mertz
1989: 103-16); this statement is in a certain way basic for the further discussion.
Accordingly, the speakers of a dialect are divided into fluent and terminal (= semispeakers according Nancy Dorian); besides, such crucial notions as subordination
(and self-deprecation, which is related to it) and heteroglossia, which are
comprehensively discussed in the following chapter.
2. On the Politics of Change (8-20). This chapter introduces, as it were, the setting
in which further action takes place. Some basic facts on the Albanians in Greece
are provided, their self-nomination and the name for the Greek language used by
them are discussed. Further on, within the frames of the history of Albanian
community in Greece, the authors proceeds to the processes of subordination
(without oppression) and self-deprecation (related to the former process), on the
one hand, and heteroglossia, in which the Greek language plays the role of power
code and Arvanítika, the role of solidarity code, on the other hand. The linguistic
situation in the communities at issue leads to the establishment of "a certain kind of
metapragmatic awareness in which an ethno-ideological view of language equates
the use of Greek forms in the intracommunity sphere of communication with
affectation" (15).
Finally, the chapter contains a sociological and sociolinguistic description and
comparison of two communities, namely, more industrialized Spáta and more
patriarchal Kiriáki. It may be noticed, however, that a consistent comparison of
linguistic data from these two communities was beyond the scope of the author’s
objectives.
3. On Sociolinguistic Change (21-65). "The focus here is on both the structural and
the sociolinguistic aspects of the shift" (6). This particularly informative chapter
contains a compressive, but nonetheless useful review of the linguistic condition of
the dialect, whereupon its conservative features, the patterns of adaptation of the
Greek vocabulary, the models of interference – phonetic first of all – with Greek
etc. are highlighted.
Further on, the author compares the speech genres, typical of Arvanítika of the
second half of 19th and beginning of 20th century, that are registered in the texts
collected by Reinhold, Meyer and Phourikis (these are rather heterogeneous and
encompass fairy tales, playful songs, speech plays, gospel excerpts; they entail,
thus, a good preservation of full-fledged syntactic and morphological structures)
with the scarce condition of contemporary narrative genres, that are poorly
differentiated. A conclusion is made that a shift from internal heteroglossia (=fully
functioning language) to heteroglossia juxtaposing Greek and Arvanítika has taken
place.
The following part is concerned with the structural changes resp. variation in the
dialect.
Based on sociolinguistic criteria the author distinguishes three types of changes,
viz. completed, continuous and discontinuous changes. Completed changes
"include those aspects of the Arvanitica grammatical system that are not part of
any synchronic variation of the community" (34). Completed changes in
Arvanítika are exemplified by the lack of admirative, fossilization of optative, and
drastic decrease of productive derivative models (which is a pronounced symptom
of language death, cf. for example Dressler 1996). It may remarked in passing,
however, that it is not quite evident that Arvanítika had the category of admirative
in the past; "some aspecrs of the history of the mood remains obscure" ( 34, n12).
Continuous changes are such that the structures involved are "less produced and
less recognized as we move from fluent to terminal speakers" (40). As an example
of such a change the fate of Albanian gerund in Arvanítika is discussed. The texts
gathered by the author have only four instances of constructions interpreted as
gerundial; out of these two have the "tuke + finite form" structure, and it is not
quite clear if these two utterances are simply agrammatical or they correspond to
the construction typical of the Greek dialects of Albanian (this construction has
been registered already by G.Meyer; it is not, as it were, found in other Albanian
dialects, cf. Çabej 1976: 146-147).
An auxiliary experiment in which subjects were supposed to translate sentences
from Greek to Arvanítika with the use of gerundial constructions and to recognize
such constructions in the Arvanítika sentences showed that the lower is the level of
language competence of a paticular speaker, the less is productivity of the
gerundial constructions. Unfortunately, the design of the experiment is described
very briefly.
The section devoted to discontinuous changes is particularly interesting. It is based
on the analysis of Greek-to-Arvanítika translations provided fluent resp. terminal
speakers. The two inflectional domains are at issue, that reflect the basic features
of the Albanian grammatical system: the Nominal-Adjectival system (including
agreement) and the Verb system (including syntactic subordination). Terminal
speakers show the signs of utter decomposition of the grammatical system: there
are abundant cases of omission of agreement markers, distortion of gender
agreement, reordering of NP components, blunders in verb inflection, a good deal
of disorder in the use of modal and tense forms, and numerous instances of the socalled fantasy morphology. In other words, pronounced symptoms of the later
stages of language shift are observed. Summing up the "sociolinguistic" chapter,
the author concludes that the notion of compromise suggested by Nancy Dorian
seem applicable to the sociolinguistic situation in Arvanítika (cf. "If in a small
linguistic community the threatened language does not face puristic pressures a
serviceable form of the language may well continue in use. On the other hand, the
lack of puristic stances causes a relaxation of corrective constraints and so makes
possible the emergence of agrammatisms", 63).
4. Performance and Ethnohistory (66-96). This chapter deals with the speech
behavior of fluent speakers. Their narrative performance ("specific use of language
by which the speaker assumes responsibility for the display of communicative
competence to an evaluating audience", 66) is characterized by three major
devices: narrative markers (hearer-oriented expressions and "formulaic material
which serves as a frame-opener for the performance of the genre", 72), samelanguage repetitions (the device "serves the purpose of effecting a shift to a
substantially new information unit in the development of the narrative plot", 73)
and couplings (instances of code switching). Besides, the author discusses those
obstacles that can be encountered by fluent speakers in the process of narrative
performance; these are first of all not appropriate conduct of terminal speakers
involved in the communication and possible attendance of Greek monolinguals
among the hearers.
The major part of the chapter is devoted to a deep and meticulous analysis of
several narrative texts, in which narrative devices (partially discussed above) are
related to the development of the plot. One of the main conclusions on this stage is
that the narratives are dialogical (in Bakhtin’s terms) in nature, which reflects "the
conflict between the two worlds, the traditional, Arvanítika-dominant, and the
modern, Greek-dominant", 82); this dialogical nature could manifest itself in codeswitching, but not entirely in it.
Language shift is reflected in a specific double-voiced character of narratives,
where "the conflict [exists] between a positive cultural stance towards Arvanítika
and a pragmatism concerning sociocultural and linguistic change" (84); this
conflict leads in a progress towards the Greek language. The chapter is concluded
by an interesting analysis of a long narrative of an uncle J., one of the last fluent
speakers of the community of Livanátes, where the Arvanítika is nearly extinct.
This uncle J. demonstrates a certain degree of agrammatism; nonetheless, "uncle J.
furnishes a poetically complex speech segment…. there is an ambiguity deriving
from the sociological condition of last, but not terminal speakers" (95).
5. The Contextualization of Terminal-Speaker Discourse and the Production of an
Across-the-Border Voice: Beyond Grammar (96-117). This chapter contains a
discussion of the speech behavior of terminal speakers. Analyzing the dialogues, in
which – as a rule – fluent speakers take part along with the terminal speakers, the
author characterizes the speech behavior of the latter as across-the-border voice.
Terminal speakers show almost complete loss of the referential function of the
language, Arvanítika is only used for the expression of their attitudes towards the
native language and their own speech community. These attitudes are thoroughly
analyzed in the chapter.
The texts produced by terminal speakers are characterized in the chapter as slim
texts, that is, the texts that hold somewhat intermediate position between formulae
and long narratives.
6. The Coding of Linguistic Ideology and Arvanítika Language Shift (118-143).
While the two foregoing chapters are devoted to the analysis of the texts produced
by fluent resp. terminal speakers, the 6th chapter tackled the problem of linguistic
ideology expressed in these texts. The two types of ideological discourse are
distinguished, namely, congruent and contradictory. The former corresponds to the
phenomenon of subordination ("I call congruent discourse the type of linguistic
ideology in which the hegemonic effects of subordination show up: in this
discourse speakers do not juxtapose the two codes of their repertoire in any
contradictory manner", 120), the latter one reflects the situation of heteroglossia ("I
call contradictory discourse the type of discursively surfacing linguistic ideology in
which the expression of the solidarity function of Arvanítika is interrupted by the
power function of Greek", 120).
An analysis of several narratives representing the two distinguished types is
provided. With respect to the contradictory discourse an important notion of
performative contradiction is introduced; this terms refers to those cases in which
the attitude of a speaker towards a certain phenomenon undergoes a change in the
process of narration. In the analysis of the internal dialogical structure of such
narratives the author notably relies on the ideas of Bakhtin - Vološinov (Vološinov
1973), in particular, he uses their terms of anticipated and disseminated reported
speech.
In the second half of the chapter, an endeavor is made to decompose the ideology
expressed in the narratives into component nuclei. Four nuclei (=ideas) are
distinguished based on the analysis of the texts: (1) "In earlier times people
suffered due to the harsh material conditions prevailing then, but moral principles
were kept in high esteem…; (2) The calendrical order of socio-religious life was
strictly observed then as against today when it is not. (3) Social roles were
predeterminated by the norm so that things were not left to the chancy turns of life
as against today when we are witnessing a moral loosening of human conduct…
(4) The Arvanítika language was once pure and people spoke without mixing their
language with Greek whereas today Arvanítika has become a bastard language"
(132). The author notes that mentioning one of these nuclei often leads to the
evolvement of the others.
7. Concluding Remarks on Ideology and Shift: Language Ideology as a Discursive
and Reconstructible Phenomenon (144-146). This short chapter summarizes the
message of the book. It is emphasized that language ideology is reconstructible
phenomenon, that is analysis of the arrangement of the elements of the narrative
allows one to reconstruct the speakers’ views on the causal relationships between
the phenomena of spiritual and social life.
Evaluation
The book by L.Tsitsipis is extremely informative and essential. Despite its
relatively small size it contains a meticulous discussion of a significant number of
problems ranging from structural changes under the process of language shift to
linguistic ideology and the ways it is expressed in narratives. The logical
consistence of the discussion of the data is undisputable, there is clear and ensuing
structure of author’s thinking reflected in the "plot" of the book. Theoretical
conclusions are deeply grounded empirically.
Several remarks to follow are not in fact deemed as polemic; rather, they are
questions and suggestions that arise inevitably in the process of reading an
interesting and informative scholarly research.
Although the distinction of fluent and terminal speakers seems quite convincing as
such, the very consistency of the former group needs some clarification. On page
140 the author makes an interesting remark that (some?) "Arvanítika-dominant
bilinguals make frequent errors in Greek". Thus the question arises if there is a
group of balanced bilinguals, and if yes, how can their performance be
characterized. It remains somewhat unclear, if the speakers of Arvanítika are
homogenous enough with respect to the linguistic ideology, that can be understood
based on their narratives, in other words, if there are any discrepancies or
gradations between speakers as regards their ideology. The very possibility of the
ideological heterogeneity of a speech community, that is, the possibility of the coexistence of several subgroups of a community differing in their metalinguistic
awareness with respect to the "dialect vs. standard language" or "first language vs.
second language" opposition is quite imaginable (cf. Rusakov, Sai forthcoming for
the description of such a community).
It would be crucial for the understanding of the sociolinguistic patterns of language
use in the speakers of Arvanítika to make an in-depth study of the processes of
code-switching in the speech of different groups of these speakers. Besides, it
could have been appropriate to provide a general description of the narrative
material: it remains unclear what kind of narrative plots are encountered along with
those discussed in the book (if there are any at all?).
The author clearly aimed at the description of the situation of language shift in
Arvanítika and not at understanding whether the patterns revealed are generally
typical of sociolinguistic situations characterized by a strong functional distribution
of two (or more) co-existing languages. However, in the course of moving along
his line of argumentation the author repeatedly draws reader's attention to various
sociolinguistically similar situations. It could have been germane to bundle
together these typological observations in order to create a kind of a background
for the discussion of particular phenomena revealed in Arvanítika communities.
Needless to say that all these remarks to do not change the fact that the book by
Lucas Tsitsipis deserves a very high evaluation.
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Hamp, Eric P.1961. On the Arvanítika dialects of Attica and the Megari.
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Данная рецензия первоначально была опубликована в электронном виде на сайте Linguistlist
(http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-3170.html).
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