ThEA - Theoretical and experimental approaches to dialectal variation and contact-induced change: a case study of Tundra Nenets
Project overview
The study of syntactic change in Siberian indigenous languages remains a largely underexplored area, with considerable potential to shed light on the shift from Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) to Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order. Investigating these changes may yield valuable insights into the mechanisms of syntactic restructuring, particularly the influence of language contact in driving such transformations.
Tundra Nenets — an endangered Indigenous language of northwestern Siberia, classified within the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family — offers a particularly compelling case study in this context. While it is fundamentally a verb-final language, instances of non-verb-final clauses have been attested, often shaped by discourse-pragmatic factors. Such structures appear across the three main dialect groups of Tundra Nenets — Western, Central, and Eastern — with varying degrees of frequency and distribution. However, the extent to which these dialects exhibit parallel patterns of syntactic change remains unclear. Given their differing levels and forms of exposure to Russian, the dominant majority language, it can be hypothesised that they may also diverge in terms of structural developments.
This project originally set out to investigate Russian-induced syntactic changes in Tundra Nenets by comparing two dialects: the Yamal dialect, spoken in the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug, and the Taymyr dialect spoken in the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug (see the map below). The study planned to employ a combined approach, integrating both theoretical and experimental syntax — along with fieldwork and experiments — a relatively novel method for investigating syntax and syntactic changes in languages of this region.
The project sought to address three central research questions:
- Are there contact-induced syntactic changes across the dialects?
- Do different sociolinguistic environments give rise to distinct patterns of syntactic change?
- Can the Tundra Nenets language offer insights into broader typological patterns of contact-induced change?
To test our general hypothesis, we focused on a specific clause type: interrogatives. Such sentences provide a valuable basis for examining contact-induced language change, as Greenberg (1966) observed that certain interrogative strategies correlate — at least to some extent — with the basic word order of a language. By examining their structure, we can thus infer the basic syntactic configuration of the dialect under study. In addition to potential syntactic variation, the prosody of interrogative sentences may also offer insights into possible linguistic change.
Revised Objectives
The ThEA project commenced in 2018. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war, fieldwork and direct data collection soon became unfeasible. As a result, we redirected our research focus. By that time, we had gathered pilot data, initially recorded in person in Moscow and later conducted online during the COVID-19 outbreak with a native speaker of the Yamal dialect of Tundra Nenets. Based on these pilot results, we identified three new directions for the project.
We abandoned the attempt to make systematic comparisons between the two aforementioned dialects and instead focused on conducting descriptive syntactic studies using the available pilot data of the Yamal dialect of Tundra Nenets. This shift was deemed necessary due to the lack of precise syntactic (and prosodic) descriptions and analyses of interrogatives — not only in Tundra Nenets but also in other Indigenous languages of the region. As a result, we have laid the groundwork for future comparisons and the identification of potential areal features.
We then initiated a comparative investigation, incorporating additional Indigenous languages spoken in regions neighboring Tundra Nenets. This analysis has allowed us to identify syntactic phenomena shared across these languages, including Tundra Nenets, and to provide coherent explanations for these syntactic patterns.
Finally, given the relatively large number of written, published texts available to us, we have placed a strong emphasis on the computational processing of Tundra Nenets data. This process involves data organisation, digital processing, and comprehensive linguistic annotation at the morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic levels, followed by systematic analysis. This aspect of the project is being carried out in collaboration with the Modyco Lab at Nanterre University, the INRIA Lab at Nancy University, the Department of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, and the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Charles University in Prague. By improving the accessibility and structural organisation of the data, we aim to support more in-depth investigations into the Nenets languages and their linguistic characteristics. For a more detailed description, visit the Tundra Nenets Linguistic Data Sets section of this homepage.
The project was funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) of Hungary under Grant ID FK 129235 from 2018 to 2025.