Russian sociolinguistics

[Dennis R. Preston]

I participated several yers ago on a "Sociolinguistics in Eastern Europe"
workshop/seminar at Indiana. It was subsequently publshed (edited by Jeff
Haslig, I believe) as a special issue of the International Journal of the
Sociology of Language. It contains a great deal about just such questions
(how can you study social class dialects in a classless society?) and
others of the sort Ron asks about.

dInIs

>Can anyone tell me about the state of dialectiology and sociolinguistics in
>Russia? Assuming that there are differences between working-class speech and
>middle-class speech in, say, Moscow (as measured in terms of a Labovian
>variable-rule model), I'm wondering if anyone has done any work on such class
>differences in large urban areas? That in itself would make a terrific
>dissertation.
>
>What I am even more interested in, though, was how such class differences
>were viewed in what was supposedly a society dedicated to the elimination of
>social class by (wherever possible) adopting proletarian values. Did the
>party-line value working-class speech above middle-class speech? Or did they
>rather reason that working-class speech was "bad" because workers were
>exploited by the old (precommunist) system? In which case they would have
>sought to teach everyone "correct" Russian (i.e., educated speech). Or
>perhaps the whole idea of "good" and "bad" grammar and pronunciation is a
>western-European thing? I rather doubt that, though, given the enormous
>influence of French and German intellectuals on Russia in the late 19th and
>early 20th centuries. I know that the Soviets were very interested in
>language questions--a number of linguistic tracts were actually published
>under Stalin's name.
>
>And has anyone in Russia read Dennis Preston's work on folk linguistics?


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736