Documentation and grammatical description of Chechen including the Cheberloi dialect (HRELP)

Zarina Molochieva

0. Introduction

Chechen is a language of the Northeast Caucasian (also known as Nakh-Dagestanian) language family of the northern Caucasus in Russia. Together with Ingush and the smaller language Batsbi (also known as Tsova-Tush), Chechen makes up the Nakh branch of the family. I plan to complete a reference grammar of Chechen (of which 20% is already drafted). The focus of this grammar is on morphology and morphosyntax, especially on hitherto unknown structures in the evidentiality/mirativity system. The focus of the corpus will be on the speech of elderly monolingual speakers who preserve structures that virtually disappeared from younger generation speakers due to intensive influence from Russian. In line with this, I plan to document any dialects of Chechen including the archaic Cheberloi dialect. The Chechen community and interested linguists will have access to all the collected materials.

1. Sociolinguistic background

The Chechens form the largest North Caucasian linguistic group. There are over one million native speakers of Chechen. However, most speakers who are younger than 70 years old are bilingual and most often proficient in Russian. The number of monolingual speakers is very low: they are either over 70 years old or belong to a very few who grew up in rural areas and had no chance to receive a secondary education. Language proficiency in Chechen depends to a great extent on the place of origin of a speaker and the language spoken at home in his/her family. Most Chechens who grew up in the city are more fluent in Russian or can understand Chechen, but do not speak it. Though Chechen has been taught at school since the 1990s, the language of instruction is Russian. As a result, there is a danger that Chechen will be functionally reduced to a household language or yield completely to Russian, with concomitant loss of much of the Chechen cultural heritage. In addition, the political situation of the last 12 years has caused population losses, economic losses, and much emigration, and as a result the breakdown of family and clan ties and other social support, what makes the younger generation rapidly shift to Russian. The monolingual speakers are very old, very few and use features of Chechen that have disappeared from the speech of bilingual, younger generation speakers.

This all leads to a dismal outlook for the language because the few remaining 'pure' speakers will not be around for much longer, while younger speakers only use Chechen in a limited number of specific situations or even choose to switch completely to Russian.

The highlands Chechens live from agriculture and from goats and sheep breeding. The children from such families mostly move to the city to attend school and live in their relatives' households.

Chechen is not traditionally a written language. The first version of the Chechen alphabet was introduced in the 19th century with a version of the Arabic alphabet. In the 1920s it was written using the Latin alphabet, but in the 1930s an orthographic system based on the Cyrillic alphabet was created and adopted.

2. Previous research

A first description of the Chechen was published in Russian in 1888 by P. Uslar. The description of Chechen syntax was written by N. Jakovlev in 1940 and morphology in 1960, but they are not comprehensive and do not satisfy current standards of language description. In addition, there is a Russian-Chechen dictionary by M. Matsiev from 1961 and several articles and books about the tense and aspect system in Chechen written by T. Desherieva and J. Desheriev in1960s. However a single comprehensive grammar has never been published.

Prof. Johanna Nichols has been working on Chechen since 1989. However, due to the unfriendly political situation it has been nearly impossible for her to conduct fieldwork in the Chechen Republic. Aside from a number of articles on Chechen grammar, she also published the first Chechen-English dictionary in 2004. She continues to work on Chechen and (primarily) Ingush to this day. Some other articles about Chechen morphosyntax (about reduplication, clause combining) were published by Jeff Good in 2004-2006.

3. Significance of the project

The primary goal of this project is to record and to archive coherent culture-specific texts produced spontaneously by elderly speakers using high quality audio formats and to analyse these in terms of their morphosyntactic structures and include complete interlinear glossing, all while there is still a chance of working with truly fluent speakers.

While working on Chechen I came across a number of features that have not been described at all but which are found only among the few remaining monolingual speakers and which are basically lost among the bilingual younger generation; this includes phenomena such as evidentiality and mirativity and the use of some preverbal prefixes.

The special preverbal prefixes express spatial deixis. They show the location of the speaker relatively to the addressee. They can be used with all verbs. For example, the deictic prefix dwa- "away from speaker" occurs with third person indirect objects, the prefix hwa- "toward speaker" occurs with first person indirect. However, the prefixes have not yet been described in detail.

Mirativity is the grammatical marking of unexpected information. The mirative suffix -q is added to the verb stem or to the auxiliary verb in compound tenses and can be used with all tenses. Bilingual speakers mostly switch to Russian to express mirativity (which is periphrastic and optional in Russian, e.g. the bilingual speakers use instead of the Chechen mirative construction xilla-q the Russian 'okazyvajetsia/kak okazalos' 'it turns out/as it turned out'), whereas speakers who have Chechen as their dominant language use verb morphology for this purpose. Another example of an archaic feature that remains today only in the highland dialect is a special use of pronouns of second person plural and singular and first person plural inclusive. These forms of pronouns can be used, if the speaker knows that the hearer is interested in her/his information, or if the hearer expects some information from the speaker. This special mirative-like function of pronouns also has not been described. These patterns show how essential it is to work with remaining monolingual speakers whose Chechen language has not been subject to much influence from Russian.

I will also document the archaic Cheberloi dialect, spoken in the south-eastern highland. This dialect is crucial to historical-comparative reconstruction, but has been only poorly described. There was a single study of the Cheberloi dialect written by A. Maciev in 1965; it is a fairly competent description, but unfortunately incomplete and rather old-fashioned. No full grammatical description of this dialect has ever been published. The Cheberloi dialect speakers live in the south-eastern highland of the Chechen Republic. All people who move to the city or move to another rural place switch to standard Chechen or Russian. I will document this dialect by recording the natural narratives, culture-specific texts, folklore, spontaneous dialogues between the elders and ethnographic texts such as recipes, descriptions of traditional procedures, etc.

In 2006 I spent six weeks in the field collecting texts (culture-specific texts and dialogues totaling approximately three hours) and eliciting different aspects of morphosyntax. So far I have had an opportunity to work through only less than a half of the data collected. As a part of this project, I will, first, transcribe and analyse the data recorded in this field trip, and second, collect and analyse new dialogues, folklore texts and descriptions of traditional activities. This task is extremely urgent as monolingual speakers are old and in the near future there will no longer be any possibility to collect such a corpus.

4. Community contexts

I originally come from the Chechen Republic, and so I have the necessary knowledge of the Chechen social culture and traditions. Thus, it will be easy for me to contact people and to win their attention and trust, a very difficult task for a stranger in this unstable region. In addition, I speak Chechen natively (and one of the highland dialect, Itumkala-dialect), as well as Russian and so I will document Chechen without any intervention of an intermediary language.

During my fieldwork in 2006 and with the invaluable help of my Chechen relatives I visited several villages in the highlands (Shali, Samashki, Pervomayskaya, Shatoi) and worked with monolingual speakers there. I plan to continue working with them during this project. Besides, I have a number of established contacts with some professors and students at the Chechen State University in Grozny (Department of General Linguistics). The professors can provide me with useful advises in analysis of culture-specific texts, and the students can occasionally help me in transcription, translation of the collected materials. In turn, my established relation to local linguistic circles guarantees the availability of the outcome of this project to them, and, more generally, their interest in my research.

Finally, it must be noted that the invaluable archive of the Chechen National Museum in Grozny was destroyed during the war. It consisted of folklore, dialect and historical recordings, which are generally aspired to be replaced as soon as possible by recording the oldest generation. My project will make a contribution to this laborious activity by supplying the Museum with the copies of all my results.

5. Research outcome

I expect to have the following data by the end of the project: (1) at least 20 hours of recorded culture-specific texts and spontaneously produced dialogs; (2) at least 4 hours of annotated culture-specific texts and spontaneously produced dialogs; (3) at least 100 pages of transcribed and glossed materials; (4) a detailed Chechen grammar in English with special focus on morphology (including the previously undescribed verbal categories such as mirativity and evidentiality) and morphosyntax. The corpus will consist of at least 2 400 clauses (approximately 600 clauses per hour). These estimates are based on the results of my fieldwork in summer 2006 and my work in the Chechen Narrative Project.

All materials that result from this project will be available to the Chechen community. Apart from the annotated texts and my English grammar of Chechen, I will prepare for the Chechen community a brochure presenting all the texts in the Cyrillic alphabet. I will distribute it in the villages where I will work, and provide a copy for the University of Grozny and the Chechen National Museum. Furthermore, I will hold a workshop at the University of Grozny presenting the results of my fieldwork and give the students and the researchers the collected material so that they can work with it themselves. This will develop further research into Chechen in the heart of this linguistic community.