The Russian language of Estonia

Éva KATONA

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Faculty of Humanities /

Doctoral School of Linguistics, Russian Linguistics Doctoral Programme, Budapest

(wica93@gmail.com)

Keywords: Estonian, Russian, interference, language contact

The aim of the research was to find out the way Estonian impacts the local variety of Russian and how the two languages coexist. Three methods were used: visiting a school with Russian as a language of instruction, interviews with the local youth (15 ex university students) and an online questionnaire with 500+ Russian Estonian participants.

In the 1940s, masses of people with Russian as their first language emigrated or had to emigrate to Estonia, then a part of the Soviet Union. After the Estonian War of Independence in 1919, the Estonian language became the state language and Russian became a minority, non-dominant language. Today, almost one third of the country’s population speaks Russian as their first language. As a result of this, the two languages interact on a daily basis.

A part of the online questionnaire dealt with the linguistic attitude of the local Russian speakers. The majority of the responders didn’t see a problem with Russian becoming different from its monolingual variety. However, several of them expressed dislike towards the Estonian influence, and showed purist views and the superiority of codified Russian (“there is only one Pushkin”). Some of them were insisting that it is the Russian language that affects the official Estonian language in bigger measures.

A really interesting aspect of the local variety of Russian are those borrowed words, which are inflected with a Russian suffix, such as the Estonian verb maksma, meaning to pay, платить in monolingual Russian, but as several of the locals answering both the questionnaire and the interview said, the word максовать is known – clearly an Estonian stem and a Russian verbal derivational suffix.

A lot of loanwords are associated with the various state institutions (e.g. Parliament, social security institution) and we can also talk about many cultural borrowings (such as names of Estonian dishes). Since there is no university with Russian as the language of instruction in Estonia, Russian students attend Estonian universities and therefore get acquainted with the academic life and its expressions in Estonian. This results in them frequently not being familiar with the Russian lexicon of the university student life and using borrowings.

There are calques coming from the Estonian language: phrases such as красивая погода and квалитетный aren’t known in monolingual Russian (хорошая погода, качественный are used instead) and are loan translations of Estonian.

In the schools for Russian pupils, some subjects are taught in Estonian – usually lighter subjects or subjects dealing with Estonia in some aspect. Still, in these classes, the conversation sometimes turns into Russian, both the pupils and the teachers use the tool of code switching to get their point across, or better convey a meaning, or to ease self-expression.

We can say there is a new variety of Russian emerging in Estonia, a language that is mostly enriched on the lexical level, but the morphology is also affected.