Paraguayská krajanská čeština, jazyková atrofie a emergentní gramatika
Paraguayan immigrant Czech, language attrition and emergent grammar

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to present the language of the Czech immigrant community in Paraguay, especially with regard to the issue of language attrition. It first presents the origin, development and current state of the Czech community in Paraguay, then the circumstances of research into their language,and then the basic characteristics of the language of the community and the causes of its variation.The variation is illustrated by the example of two investigated phenomena: innovations in the reflexive possessive pronoun and in nominal morphology. The article attempts to point out their replaceable role of communication for the emergence of regularity in changes, and the fact that the processes in attriting languages tend to speak in favor of the concept of emergent grammar.Rather than a conclusion, however, this is a suggestion of a possible perspective in the research on attriting languages, as the limited scope of the article does not allow the necessary comparison to be made with data from other situations of language attrition.

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