Linguistic diversity in the Volga-Kama Region (LIDIVOKA)

The Russian Federations Volga-Kama Region, located some 700 kilometres east of Moscow around the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers close to the city of Kazan, has been a meeting place of different cultures, religions, and languages since before the start of recorded history. Today, languages spoken in the region belong to three families: in addition to Russian (an Indo-European language distantly related to English and German) which became dominant in the region around the 16th century, a number of Uralic languages (related to Finnish and Hungarian) and Turkic languages (related to Turkish), whose presence in the region predates the historical eastwards expansion of the Russian state, are still spoken by several hundred thousand speakers each. Despite the large number of speakers and their long-standing presence in this region, many facets of these languages have to date not been adequately described. The project at hand is an international collaboration by Austrian and Russian scholars to create an online database which will contain commented audio-visual materials of the languages of this region and information on the fascinating manner in which these languages have interacted with one another throughout history, but also in which respect the closely related languages of the region still differ. We aim not only to cover comparatively straight-forward influences such as loan words (i.e. individual words from one language adopted in another language), but also more subtle ways in which these languages have influenced one another in other ways, i.e. in grammar, for example how words can be arranged in certain types of sentences. This resource will be based not only on existing research, but also on our own field research carried out by our Moscow-based colleagues on a regular basis. We aim to make our resources accessible not only to an international community of language scholars, but also to members of the speaker communities themselves. Our openly accessible database will be a tool for them to get a better picture of their languages history and interactions with neighbouring languages. Furthermore, we will publish our results through scientific journals and a number of books concerning the specific research topics individual members of our team will be studying as well as reference and teaching materials for the individual languages under consideration.

The project LIDIVOKA 'Linguistic Diversity in the Volga-Kama Region' set out to describe linguistic convergence and divergence between the genealogically diverse (Turkic, Uralic, Indo-European) languages of the Volga-Kama Region of European Russia, some 700 kilometres east of Moscow around the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Pairwise contacts between individual languages of the region (e.g., Russian Chuvash, Chuvash Mari, Mari Tatar, Tatar Udmurt), especially pertaining to the lexicon, has been subject to extensive research for over a century, but there has been comparatively little research analysing other layers of language - morphology, syntax, and beyond - in a holistic manner. This comparatively small body of research has, however, postulated the Volga-Kama Region as a Sprachbund: an area in which languages show more convergence than one would expect based on genealogy. The LIDIVOKA database, published at lidivoka.univie.ac.at, summarizes both the existing literature as well as original research carried out by our project team pertaining to the convergence (between genealogically distant varieties) and divergence (between genealogically close varieties): in which languages and varieties of the region is Wednesday 'blood day'; in which languages and varieties can one add an -j to a kinship term to create a vocative form; in which languages and varieties does 'better than nobody' mean 'the very best', and many dozens of other features, are described. The most fundamental insight as regards the standing of the Volga-Kama Region as an area of linguistic diversity has been: It's complicated! Many features turned out to be subject to variation; resources developed by our project team (e.g., the Corpus of Literary Mari with its 60+ million tokens covering over a century of Mari literacy) will allow the future study of features that turned out not to be black or white matters. Furthermore, numerous features in the past described as convergence features of the region can be found in Turkic languages outside of the region as well as non-Turkic languages that have been subject to contact influence from these, motivating future macro-areal investigations of the features under consideration, comparing the Volga-Kama Region with other peripheries of the Turkophone world: The Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia. In our project database, we have been consistently honest about our uncertainty and the limits of our knowledge, making clear where further research is needed, either through the microscope (looking at the dialectal and diachronic variation of a feature) or from a greater distance (looking at the distribution of a feature across Northern Eurasia). As an open and expandable infrastructure, we hope to expand upon this compendium of what is known about the linguistic structuring of this region when the body of what is known expands.