Research & Expertise

Dagestan is a relatively new territory for the spread of the Russian language. At the end of the 19th century, very few people spoke Russian here. In addition to indigenous languages, which Dagestan is very rich in (linguists count more than forty languages ​​in this small territory), local people spoke Azerbaijani, Georgian, Chechen and Arabic. But there has never been a language common for all residents of Dagestan (the language of interethnic communication or lingua franca). Russian became the first such language for Dagestan.

On November 3-5, the members of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory Michael Daniel and Nina Dobrushina gave two lectures each at the University of Pavia.

This fall the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory will organize a free online course on the East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) language family. The course will start on November 3.

In early October, members of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory published a paper in Language . Language is the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America and one of the most respected general linguistics journals in the world; perhaps the most prestigious one. Since the journal’s launch in 1925, it has seen the publication of only two papers whose first author is a researcher affiliated with a Russian university or institute.

One of the tasks of the International Linguistic Convergence Laboratory is the creation of new open electronic resources dedicated to the minor languages ​​of Russia, Russian dialects and contact varieties of Russian speech. For more than four years, these resources have become so abundant that the laboratory had to acquire its own server and create a special website where all the resources are conveniently located.

From February 4 to March 20, the School of Linguistics hosted a series of lectures on the foundations of language evolution. The course was read by Damian Blasi, the member of Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, an author and co-author of works on fundamental problems in creole linguistics, linguistic symbolism and the history of linguistic diversity. In his lectures Damian Blasi considered both the main aspects of the theory of the language evolution, as well as more narrow topics, such as the structure of animal communication systems and their differences from human language, the time of the speech appearance in humans, biological and genetic foundations of language ability, multilingualism, and models of linguistic evolution.

A new Oxford Handbook dedicated to the languages of the Caucasus appeared this month. It contains several contributions from members of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory.

The Linguistic convergence laboratory organized an open course in English about the main area of ​​expertise of the laboratory - the languages ​​of the Nakh-Daghestanian (also known as East Caucasian) language family.