KENNETH ZUERCHER
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of the Requirements
for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
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a note will indicate the deletion.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
bringing this project to completion. I would also like to thank my committee: Laurel
Stvan, David Silva, Jala Garibova, and Pete Smith. Your assistance and advice has been
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and will be invaluable. Thank you for your contributions to my present and future
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success. Next I would like to thank the Azerbaijani University of Languages in Baku for
lending me your vice rectors time (Jala Garibova) and sponsoring my visas in 2006 and
2007.
consulting on numerous points of interpretation. Without you this project would have
been impossible. Thanks as well to all those who participated in the study. Your names
have been changed in the text that follows, but I know who you are and I appreciate the
time you spent recording data and discussing it with me. Lastly, I would like to thank the
God of the universe who created such an amazing diversity of human beings and this
curse called language through which we live our social lives. Blessed be His Name.
September 24, 2009
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ABSTRACT
AZERBAIJANI-RUSSIAN CODE-SWITCHING AND CODE-MIXING:
FORM, FUNCTION, AND IDENTITY
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From incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1828, through the collapse of the
U.S.S.R. in 1991 governmental language policies and other socio/political forces
influenced the Turkic population of the Republic of Azerbaijan to speak Russian. Even
with changes since independence Russian use including various kinds of codeswitching and code-mixing continues. This dissertation studies the language situation
in Azerbaijan through a detailed analysis of naturally occurring conversational data.
Approaches include corpus analysis of the transcribed data to show relative amounts of
Azerbaijani and Russian, linguistic description of the types of code-switching and codemixing, quantitative analysis of variation between subjects, and sequential analysis of a
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occurs in stative clauses with the data showing evidence for a zero copula in Azerbaijani
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use to conform to social norms in some family domains and professional contexts, using
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substantial Russian and Russian code-mixing in private domains when appropriate for the
situation and interlocutor, as well as using Russian to contest traditional gender roles and
portray themselves as modern and free of stereotypes.
The results of this analysis do not contradict recent theoretical and descriptive
work on code-switching/mixing (Muysken 2000, Myers-Scotton 2002) but confirm their
propositions with a new language pair. They also open the door to further research into
language behavior in the former Soviet space by providing a data oriented description of
language behavior and linguistic identity construction in Azerbaijan.
While
governmental language policy and planning firmly support the development and use of
Azerbaijani, Russian use persists in some sectors of society.
The research for this dissertation was conducted under UT Arlington IRB
protocol #06.95s following a pilot project conducted under protocol #05.276.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................... iii
ABSTRACT........................................................................................................... iv
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ................................................................................ xii
LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................... xiii
Page
Chapter
1. AZERBAIJAN: SOCIO-HISTORICAL
AND LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND ........................................................1
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1.2 Immigration................................................................................4
1.3 Language policy, planning, and development
in Azerbaijan ....................................................................................5
1.3.1 The Russian Empire: 1828-1918 ................................6
1.3.2 The U.S.S.R.: 1920-1991 ............................................7
1.3.3 The Republic of Azerbaijan: 1991-present ...............10
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Appendix
A. SURVEYS AND INFORMATION SHEETS USED IN
GATHERING RECORDED DATA ENGLISH VERSIONS ..............236
B. ALPHABETS USED IN AZERBAIJAN ...........................................241
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xi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure
Page
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xii
LIST OF TABLES
Table
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2-3 Diagnostic features of the three patterns of code-mixing (Muysken 2000: 230) ........36
2-4 Hymes etic grid (Schiffrin 1994: 142) .......................................................................42
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4-1 Summary of subjects and data collected in the Home recordings ...............................98
4-2 Initial analysis: Azerbaijani and Russian content words ...........................................101
4-3 List of seletions for the ten minute samples corpus...................................................102
4-4 Staged conversation participants from most Azerbaijani (A) to Russian (R)
influence ...........................................................................................................................103
4-5 Description of conversations between subjects at opposite ends of Table 4-4 .........105
4-6 Description of conversations involving Vahid ..........................................................105
4-7 Number of turns with alternation between CPs .........................................................107
4-8 Count of Azerbaijani and Russian adverbs with Azerbaijani and Russian CPs ........110
4-9 Azerbaijani CPs with movement past the verb ..........................................................111
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6-12 Rank order of at home with adults subjects for each statistically
significant measure of overall language use ....................................................................160
6-13 Rank order correlations for three measures of overall language use .......................160
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7-16 Chi-square tests for Azerbaijani CPs with and without Russian insertion
in Sevils conversation with her daughter ........................................................................190
7-17 Sevils conversational roles and their language norms ...........................................198
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CHAPTER 1
AZERBAIJAN: SOCIO-HISTORICAL AND LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND1
The country that is now the Republic of Azerbaijan has been subject to a number
of linguistic and political influences throughout history: Turkic, Persian, Arabic, Russian,
and now (since the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991) English. In order to give a fuller
picture of the language situation in Azerbaijan, this dissertation analyzes the ways in
which Azerbaijani and Russian interact within conversation. This chapter provides an
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Chapter 2 summarizes the relevant literature for the present study, while Chapter 3
provides descriptions of both the Azerbaijani and Russian linguistic systems.
The
Much of the information in this chapter was adapted from Zuercher 2004: 1-14 and was
also utilized for Zuercher 2009.
1
2001 governmental statistics, the total population of the country is slightly more than 8.1
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the Great in the 4th century BC. The Romans appeared in the area in the 1st century BC
and left what may be the easternmost Roman inscription near the capital city, Baku.
By the 4th century BC two states had emerged in the area: Caucasian Albania in
the territory now occupied by the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Aturpatkan in what is now
the state of Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran. Albania became Christian in the 4th century
AD, but learned Islam from Arabic invaders in the 7th century. This state survived into
the 9th century as a vassal state of the Persian Empire, and was succeeded by the state of
Shirvan. Four dynasties of Shirvan Shahs ruled from the 9th century to around 1530. The
Shirvan Palace in Baku is considered a national landmark. Shia Islam was adopted by
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the rulers of Shirvan in the 16th century and is the most common religion in Azerbaijan
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today.
The influx of Turks into this area occurred in various waves between the 4th and
11th centuries, but there is debate as to the date of their first arrival, and thus the ethnicity
of the Caucasian Albanians or the inhabitants Shirvan.
Ashurbeyli stated that from antiquity the Shirvan region had been a place where
Caucasian-, Iranian-, and Turkish-speaking tribes mingled and argued that in the
6th century intensive migrations of Turks in Aran, Shirvan, and Mughan
occurred (Altstadt 1992:5).
An alternative view is that there was a direct ethnic link between Albania and Turks.
Whichever interpretation is taken, it is indisputable that complete Turkization had taken
place by modern times.
By the end of the 17th century, the area was fully under Persian influence and part
of the Persian Empire until the early 1800s, when it came under the Russian rule as a
result of the Russo-Iranian wars (1804-1813 and 1826-1828). In 1828 the treaty of
Turkmanchai set the border between the two empires as the Araxes River, leaving
northern Azerbaijan under Russian control and southern Azerbaijan a part of the Persian
Empire.
Since independence from the U.S.S.R. in 1991, modern nation building efforts
have caused Azerbaijanis to look to the ancient indigenous states as ancestors of the
current Republic. In particular, references to the Caucasian Albanians as distinct from
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Armenians are commonly used to refute claims by neighboring Armenia that the Nagorno
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1.2 Immigration
With Russian political domination in the 19th century came large numbers of
Russian and other non-Muslim immigrants. While some Russian peasants immigrated to
the countryside as agricultural workers, the vast majority came as administrative workers
and industrialists to the larger cities, especially Baku.
For Azerbaijan, the late 19th century was characterized by industrialization with
Baku becoming the center of oil production for the Russian Empire. This brought many
Russians and Armenians (also Russian speakers) to Baku as workers and administrators.
Thus, Baku developed a culture quite apart from the rest of Azerbaijan. Given this
combination of development and immigration, marriage between ethnic Azerbaijanis and
other nationalities was fairly common, especially under the U.S.S.R.
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Baku has continued to be more oriented toward the Russian language than the rest
of the country. According to de Waal, probably based on observations from the late
1990s, The city's lingua franca is still just as much Russian as Azeri, spoken with a
gentle southern lilt that rises in intonation at the end of a sentence (2003: 98). However,
Russian is rarely heard in public any longer, though a high percentage of the population
know it and may speak it in certain private contexts.
1.3 Language policy, planning, and development in Azerbaijan
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development of a language in the direction desired by the planners (1959: 8). Based on
a range of research, Hornberger identifies three types of language planning:
Status planning those efforts directed toward the allocation of functions of
languages/literacies in a given speech community
Acquisition planning efforts to introduce the allocation of users or the
distribution of languages/literacies, by means of creating or improving opportunity
or incentive to learn them, or both.
Corpus planning those efforts related to the adequacy of the form or structure of
languages/literacies (2006: 28)
Moreover, each of these three types of planning can be approached from one of two
perspectives (Hornberger 2006: 29): a Policy Planning perspective (focus on form
language of instruction. Though Russian was never the object of corpus planning in
Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani has undergone constant development both through private and
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Under the Russian Empire, from the Treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828 to a short
lived independence in 1918, Azerbaijan functioned as a colonial territory (the colonial
model of integration - Laitin 1998: 66 ff). As the language of government and of much
commerce, Russian experienced an increase in status. Though there were a few Russian
language schools, they were not accessible to the vast majority of the Azerbaijani
speaking population.