Looking back twenty years at Budzhak-Jones & Poplack’s 1997 linguistic analysis
of two generations of Ukrainian speakers in Canada
My great-grandfather’s cousin’s family back in Kiev
may all drive a "machine,"
but the rest of us here in Canada
will always drive a "car"
Svitlana Budzhak-Jones
and Shana Poplack assembled a 10-hour
corpus of spontaneous conversation
from
7 local speakers from the Ukrainian expatriate community in
Ottawa. The target speech was the speakers’ notion
of Ukrainian, with English interspersions as
they
spontaneously arose.
The
authors call these multi-word code-switches “stretches” (p.241).
The
authors documented
their analyses and conclusions on several fronts
in a 1997 article in
the Journal
of Sociolinguistics, “Two generations, two strategies: The
fate of bare
English-origin
nous in Ukrainian.” In
the
following critique of their assumptions, methods,
and conclusions, I refer to
the authors and
their article as
BJ&P. BJ&P set up binary conditions to categorize loanwords
from English into the Ukrainian spoken in Canada, as I've indicated in the preceding diagram.
Summary
of B-J&P data and method
BJ&P
divided their set of speakers
into two cohorts based
on year of birth, then documented how well conversations matched target
values for Standard Ukrainian as defined with the help of
a native speaker (i.e.,
the
primary author) and
dictionary references from
the previous 35 years. Each age cohort included speakers matched for place of
birth, native language,
language community, and years
speaking English
and Ukrainian. Facility measures included meta-linguistic “discourse flagging” (p.238) and grammaticality judgments
from the primary author, supplemented with prescriptive formulae. BJ&P examined
a primary
conflict area and two
conflicts within
it, as
well as a second conflict related to
those.
(1) Inflectional markers on nouns
(a) Nouns from
the Ukrainian lexicon nouns
(b)
Nouns
“borrowed” from the
English lexicon
(2) Generational
differences, as characterized by the birth year cohort of speakers
Their innovative approach for (2) was
to compare the two
cohorts to each
other rather than
to Standard Ukrainian.
Thus, their baseline was close to 80%
for correct
inflectional productions rather than 100%. The
higher scores
came from the cohort
born between 1920
and 1940. The cohort
born between 1966
and 1977 performed
at
lower facility across all
parts
of BJ&P’s metric (1).1 At the time of the study,
the speakers in each cohort fell into these age ranges: 25.6 +/- 5.6 and
66.6 +/- 9.62
Conclusions from B-J&P
B-J&P state their motivation for this area of research
in their final paragraph (p.253):
to establish the need for a metric of bilingualism.
They
propose that these data could
support a metric based on comparing relative occurrences
of
inflectional endings. Truly “bilingual”
speakers perform better at reaching putative inflectional targets.
--------------------------
2 Again, this is not explicit in the article. I have used the age ranges that the authors give in order to compute a
median within the range.
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Critique
I just referred to the "inflectional targets" as “putative” because that contention forms
the majority of my critique. Before Monday-
morning quarterbacking, let
us review the innovative reach of BJ&P’s
work in its attempt to tease out
how an individual in a dual
language contact world
separates, fuses, and
switches between L1 and L2 when living in
an L2
environment.
BJ&P compared two languages with
differing morphological typology. English is analytic because it relies on
word order and has few inflectional
morphemes; Ukrainian
is fusional as it loads its morphemes with more than one inflectional
purpose. Specifically,
BJ&P use
evidence from how different generations of
bilinguals integrate loanwords.
BJ&P want to learn whether the words are integrated lexical additions
or code-switching tokens. This underlies the question
of how to categorize the multiplicative products
of language contact. Is there a Canadian
version
of Ukrainian or is
there a Ukrainian version of Canadian English? At what point is there a synthesis of
Ukrainian and English?
The synthesis would
have the syntax of the substrate language (Ukrainian) with additions
from the superstrate lexicon
(English).
Interestingly enough,
the Canadian example is the obverse of the phenomenon of
prestige considerations in the “language contact” paradigm between
an indigenous substrate and superstrate intrusive
language. Here we
have a substrate intrusive language (Western
rural
Ukrainian) and
a superstrate majority language (Canadian English).
The strata state of Canadian Ukrainian
is unaddressed.
There is some reference to
divergent forms
of Ukrainian. There are also early public school instruction materials in
Ukrainian, used and written in Canada.
They provide evidence of a language community separate from the European one.
BJ&P do not consider whether a speaker may
want to mark an English word
as
[+foreign] by retaining the English pronunciation.3
BJ&P’s work does not touch
on these factors,
which
have become current areas
of interest: heritage speakers; language identity;
Canadian
Ukrainian as a dialect; and
language priming that takes place depending on
the language
setting. BJ&P relied on one of the paper’s authors for
grammaticality judgments because she spoke European Ukrainian, but this might
skew their ideas of grammaticality and standardization.
BJ&P did not consider using other years for boundaries to define the Ukrainian waves of immigration. Enumerating the birth years provides a new window into whether the speakers were speaking a dialect of Canadian Ukrainian related to their immigration wave. Wave I was pre-1914 (Duravetz 1988) and Wave II followed that and was prior to WWII (Makuch). The older cohort in the study may be from Waves I and II, and not necessarily Wave III. The heritage speakers may have learnt an evolving form of Canadian Ukrainian.
BJ&P did not consider using other years for boundaries to define the Ukrainian waves of immigration. Enumerating the birth years provides a new window into whether the speakers were speaking a dialect of Canadian Ukrainian related to their immigration wave. Wave I was pre-1914 (Duravetz 1988) and Wave II followed that and was prior to WWII (Makuch). The older cohort in the study may be from Waves I and II, and not necessarily Wave III. The heritage speakers may have learnt an evolving form of Canadian Ukrainian.
-----------------------------------------------
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The authors
do not document the linguistic setting for interviews. The
prime interviewer was a newly arrived, university-educated native speaker of
Ukraine, who likely lacked the rural flavors of regional variation. University of California researcher Jeff Elman (1977) found that the language environment
in bilingual studies skews
phonological boundaries
(i.e. Voice Onset
Timing or VOT) toward the
primed language.
That is, if the testing environment is Spanish speaking,
then the bilinguals are more likely to
categorize voiced and
voiceless stops along the Spanish boundary of +4
millisecond rather than use the
English-speakers’ +30 msec. boundary. Specifically, informants would hear "ball" for "Paul" if the researcher greets them and explains the task in Spanish.
Paradigms for setting up research on bilingual populations have evolved since 1997, so these detailed points do not disavow the original findings. The basis of any metric is its repeatability no matter the investigator. Refinements to a protocol are part of the research process. Addressing these critical points will move to a standard protocol, so future researchers can derive a consistent model that supports a metric for bilingual assessment.
Paradigms for setting up research on bilingual populations have evolved since 1997, so these detailed points do not disavow the original findings. The basis of any metric is its repeatability no matter the investigator. Refinements to a protocol are part of the research process. Addressing these critical points will move to a standard protocol, so future researchers can derive a consistent model that supports a metric for bilingual assessment.
Duravetz, G. (1988, Sept), Ukrainian
immigration to Canada 1891-1914. The Ukrainian Canadian. Retrieved
from Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) Web site: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/histoires_de_chez_nous-community_memories/pm_v2.php?id=story_line&lg=English&fl=0&ex=464&sl=5504&pos=1
Budzhak-Jones, S. and Poplack, S. (1997), Two generations, two strategies: The
fate of bare
English–origin nouns in Ukrainian. Journal
of Sociolinguistics, 1 (2), 225–258. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9481.00013
Elman,
J. L., Diehl, R. L., & Buchwald, S. E. (1977). Perceptual switching in
bilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 62(4),
971-974. DOI: 10.1121/1.381591
Makuch
A. (n.d.). The history of Ukrainians in Canada. Retrieved
from Toronto Ukrainian Genealogy Group Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20120131202612/http://www.torugg.org/History/history_of_ukrainians_in_canada.html Note: Earlier archived versions of this
article do not show an author.
by Michelle K. Gross, postgraduate student assignment for Professor Minglang Zhou
SLAA629A Special Topics in Sociolinguistics -- Variationist Sociolinguistics, Professor Steven Ross
2015-October-16
This squib is archived as https://archive.is/wip/Bl8ua and as
