PIETŲ AUKŠTAIČIŲ ŠNEKTOS BALTARUSIJOJE: KALBŲ SĄVEIKOS PADARINIAI
SOUTHERN AUKŠTAITIAN DIALECT IN BELARUS: THE RESULT OF LANGUAGE INTERPLAY

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the interplay of extension of southern Aukštaitian subdialect in Belarus, i.e. some Lithuanian sudialects of Varanavas region, and the main language: innovations which occurred or are still developing at different language levels. Part of specific peculiarities in the realm of phonetics, syntax or lexis developed as a result of derivation or other means, whereas the other part developed as a result of borrowing from contact Slavonic languages (Belarusian, Polish, less frequently Russian) on the basis of derivational or meaning analogies. The sound articulation of bilingual informants appears to be similar to Belarusian pronunciation of sounds. Due to the impact of the Slavonic languages and internal dialect development, there is a tendency for long vowels to become shorter. Also, the quality of vowels tends to change. This process can be related to intensive monophthongization of diphthongs ie and uo in the eastern part of Varanavas region. Due to the deterioration of the opposition between short and long vowels in bilingual and monolingual informants’ speech, short stressed vowels tend to be prolonged while long vowels tend to be shortened. Natural development of vowels, which is apparently influenced by the Slavonic languages, causes dephonologization of vowel qualitative relations. “Middle word intonation”, which is becoming more and more entrenched in the subdialect, is the result of dephonologization of word intonation. The biggest changes were observed in pronouncing circumflexed diphthongs at the end of a word and in the position of penultimate syllable: vowel pressure is moved to the first component of mixed diphthongs. This pronunciation is supported by the Slavonic languages. Varanavas dialects contain a lot of lexical and grammatical borrowings. This is one of the conditions which accelerates inclusion and acceptance of borrowed syntactical models in the Lithuanian language. Instead of “pure” cases, prepositional constructions become prevailing. Still they have not completely displaced non prepositional constructions characteristic of the subdialects under research. Expressive means of the Belarusian language especially those which are not characteristic of the Lithuanian language are likely to be identified as relevant and acceptable. Due to this reason, the lexis of periphery dialects becomes poor, its semantics is being destroyed, the Lithuanian language becomes denationalized – this is what might be called as one-sided bilingualism.

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