Viktoria Zubkova, George Moroz, Chiara Naccarato (HSE University) Phonological adaptation of Russian borrowings in Avar-Andic languages

In this talk we will discuss processes of phonological adaptation of Russian borrowings in languages of the Andic branch of East Caucasian. Dictionary data from eight Andic languages are compared to data from Avar, the closest relative of Andic within the family and a major lingua franca in northern Daghestan. We will illustrate the process of data annotation, our qualitative analysis of the correspondences, and their modeling with a mixed effect logistic regression. As we will show, modeling the probability of loanword adaptation gives a hierarchy of languages that is partially explained by a language’s history of direct contact with Russian and authorship of the dictionaries, but does not fully match with geographic distances and phylogenetic classifications, nor with population sizes. Factors known to play a role in processes of loanword adaptation, i.e., time depth and frequency of use, show the expected effect but their predictive strength is not statistically significant.