Asmeninė kalba: laiškai šiaurės panevėžiškių patarme
Private language: personal correspondence in the North Panevėžiškiai subdialect

Summary/Abstract: Personal correspondence written by less educated or less literate people becomes a useful resource for dialect research, since it reveals usage of certain dialectal features and emerging influence of the standard language. Therefore, in this article I analyze a set of 14 personal letters written by Marijona Krivickienė between 1955 and 1968 and sent to the U.S. from Lithuania. Since the letters were written in the North Panevėžiškiai subdialect, the main focus of this article was dialectal features of the writer’s language, possible impact of the standard language, and development of an individual orthographical system. The most salient and unique individual orthographical feature in the letters is the usage of the redundant graphemes <i> and <e> (rarely <a>) in consonant clusters to separate consonants by a vowel. Usage of the redundant graphemes is systematic. For instance, the grapheme <i> was inserted (1) in the middle of the word (2) in the word final position instead of reduced endings, and (3) in the end of one-syllable particles, conjunctions, and adverbs after the consonants. On the other hand, the grapheme <e> was usually inserted in front of a sonorant in word initial position. In this article I propose three possible accounts for the redundant grapheme usage: (1) palatalization of consonants, (2) anaptyxis, and (3) generalization of the most common syllable type CV to avoid consonant clusters.

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