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- Title
VILNIAUS KLAUSIMAS BENDRINĖS LIETUVIŲ KALBOS SAMPRATOSE: METALINGVISTINIŲ VILNIEČIŲ KOMENTARŲ TYRIMAS.
- Authors
Vaicekauskienė, Loreta; Čičirkaitė, Ramunė
- Abstract
The paper focuses on two concepts of standard language (SL) -- the dominant official one and that of ordinary speakers -- and raises the issue of whether the speech prevalent in the capital city of Vilnius could be seen as forming modern spoken Lituanian. Unlike the other speech communities where the SL developed from the way people spoke in the capital city, the Lithuanian SL is based on the morphology and phonetics of the southern sub-dialect of West Highland. At the time of the formation of the SL at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th c., Lithuanian was practically not used in Vilnius. Polish and Yiddish were the languages spoken; and in general the question of whom the Vilnius city itself "belonged" to (the notorious "Vilnius Question") was not solved in favour of the Lithuanian state. Today the situation with Vilnius is completely different: Vilnius is a multilingual city, but Lithuanian is dominant. The language of Vilnius is regarded as the SL by many dialect speakers and the features of it are spreading in the broadcast media. Nevertheless the normative ideology still rules out the possibility that the language spoken by most inhabitants of Vilnius could be viewed as a standard variety. The core element of the official concept of the SL is a correctness and purity that must be regulated and enforced by law. Vilniusian speech is downgraded in the official ideological discourse and due to Polish, Russian, and dialectal interference is held to be a polluted semi-language. The research was based on 64 interviews, conducted in 2010, with Vilnius-born speakers of different age and social status. The metalinguistic commentaries revealed that in spite of the official ideology the Vilniusian language is scored highest among other varieties of Lithuanian. The citizens of Vilnius base their attitudes on a different concept of SL than the prescriptive one. For them the SL is first of all tied to the language of the capital, and the main criterion of assignment of it to the SL is unmarkedness with respect to dialectal features. Correctness is also included in the concept of the SL but for ordinary Vilniusians correct language means not the codified pronunciation and grammar but no dialectal features. In addition, the informants claimed that the prescriptive requirement of correctness often clashed with the liveliness and stylistic variation that are important for their understanding of the language. Their attitudes towards the language of broadcasting turned out to be fully consistent with the general evaluations: as the Vilnius language was assigned the status of the SL, the language of broadcasting was naturally interpreted as the same or very similar to the Vilnius language. Thus the dominant attitudes of the interviewed citizens of Vilnius confirm the high status of the Vilnius language as the language of the capital. If we accept the theoretical presumption that the use of language depends on the linguistic self-confidence of speakers and that positive covert evaluations may eventually influence linguistic development, then the belief (even ideologically rejected as wrong and quasi-standard) that the speech of Vilnius is the SL may lead to an actual competition between the Vilnius language and the conservative SL.
- Subjects
VILNIUS (Lithuania); STANDARD language; LANGUAGE policy; PHONETICS; MULTILINGUALISM
- Publication
Darbai ir Dienos, 2011, Issue 56, p57
- ISSN
1392-0588
- Publication type
Article