Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the process of Russian lexical borrowings into the language of the Teleuts - a small-numbered indigenous Turkic-speaking community in Southern Siberia. This process began in the 17th century and encompassed a strictly outlined number of semantic fields which reflected the areas where Russian colonists interacted with South Siberian nomads. This lead to the enrichment of Teleut with Russian loanwords denoting new material culture items or social relations like qalotqo 'beehive' or qorot 'town'. About 0,8% (30 out of 3800) of all lexical entries attested in the Russian-Teleut dictionary have Russian origin being in most cases phonetically and morpho-phonologically adapted to the Teleut language system. However in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras the process of Russian lexical borrowings became invasive which lead to introduction of many hundreds of new lexical items which Teleut did not (and still does not) seem to be able to adapt, neither semantically nor morpho-phonologically. I hereby assume that rapid shrinkage of communicative scope of Teleut accompanied with massive Russian lexical infiltration leads to the erosion of the language, which has been proved during my linguistic fieldtrips.

Since all those speakers who still have full command of Teleut are bilingual it is somewhat difficult to tell between borrowings on the one hand and code-mixing, code-switching and insertions on the other when they occasionally use Russian words. If those words of Russian origin are not attested in the dictionaries and are not traditionally used long enough to be regarded as semantically adapted borrowings, does it mean we witness the Teleut-Russian code-mixing or borrowing of a new lexical item into Teleut? I admit there are many factors to be considered here including not only linguistic but social as well, such as situational pragmatics and interlocutors' attitudes.

The basis of this research are various lexicographic editions of Teleut issued between 1866 and 2008 (mainly dictionaries) as well as linguistic material from fieldtrips which were made possible due to Endangered Languages Documentation Program (ELDP) supported by SOAS ELDP foundation in 2016-2019.