Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, languages that had previously been subordinate to Russian achieved new status as national languages of newly independent nation states, and monolingual Russians living in these regions suddenly found themselves to be minority language speakers. In this detailed and meticulously documented volume, Verschik analyzes the effect of these political and social changes on the variety of Russian spoken by native speakers in Estonia. Although this account of contact-induced language change is geared toward sociolinguists, it may also hold much interest for SLA scholars who examine phenomena such as crosslinguistic influence in SLA or bilingualism.
The heart of the volume lies in numerous examples of Estonian Russian drawn from a corpus of television broadcasts, printed materials, and everyday conversational exchanges observed (but apparently not audio recorded) by the author; these examples are analyzed through the framework of code-copying (e.g., Johanson, Reference Johanson2002). Although the details of this model cannot be enumerated here, the essential argument is that any feature of a language (e.g., lexical items, intonation patterns, morphosyntax) can be copied by a speaker of another language for a variety of reasons (i.e., limited proficiency in the second language, language play, pragmatic effects) and that such innovations at the individual level may eventually lead to more widespread structural change. Unlike some other models, this model rejects the possibility of structural constraints on copying and attends to social as well as structural factors.
Although the phenomenon of second language influence on the first language has been documented elsewhere (e.g., Cook, Reference Cook2003), this book makes several contributions to the field. First, Verschik builds a compelling case in favor of the code-copying model, which is supported by extensive, carefully analyzed, and clearly explained examples from her corpus. These examples, including many taken from conversations among Russian-dominant speakers in which the use of Estonian would not be expected, illustrate the range of Estonian linguistic features subject to copying into Russian, from analytic verbs (whose meanings are directly translated) to discourse markers. Additionally, the focus on language change in an emergent bilingual society (i.e., one in which most speakers have some proficiency in both languages), rather than the more common focus on the language of immigrants or autochthonous minorities, allows the author to consider the ways that the peculiarities of the Russian-Estonian situation has led to distinctive patterns of code-copying that are not necessarily attested to in other studies.
Throughout this volume, Verschik stresses the importance of a microsociolinguistic methodology that takes into account how speakers actually use language in the course of day-to-day interaction. From this perspective, her use of naturally occurring (vs. elicited) language samples is noteworthy and much appreciated, although the fact that spoken examples were taken from field notes rather than recordings is questionable. Additionally, although Verschik situates these examples within the broader sociolinguistic framework of emergent Russian bilingualism in Estonia, the immediate interactional context (i.e., what prompted the utterance or the response that followed) is rarely taken into account in the analysis, even though this context may arguably be relevant to a speaker’s code choice. Finally, given the author’s interest in the social as well as structural aspects of contact-induced language change, the lack of discussion of language ideologies—a theme that has been taken up productively by a number of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists who research language contact and change (e.g., Silverstein, Reference Silverstein1998)—is curious.
Nevertheless, these issues should not detract from what is, overall, a notable achievement. Although the level of detail and depth of linguistic analysis makes this book most suitable for specialists, this audience will find much valuable information in this volume. In particular, the author’s thoughtful comparison and critique of the various models used in the study of contact-induced language change (and her argument against the presumed monolingual bias inherent in many of them) will make for thought-provoking reading.
