Forthcoming: Intensive language contact in the Caucasus: The case of Tsova-Tush

Jesse Wichers Schreur

Keywords:

Language contact, Caucasus, Tsova-Tush, Georgian, Nakh languages

Synopsis

Tsova-Tush is an East Caucasian language spoken in one single village in Eastern Georgia by approximately 300 speakers. Since its early description, scholars have been intrigued by the high degree of linguistic influence from the Georgian language. This book has a threefold goal: (1) To contribute to the overall description of the Tsova-Tush language, by filling gaps in the previous literature in absence of a reference grammar. (2) To contrast Tsova-Tush constructions with functionally equivalent constructions in Chechen and Ingush, its closest relatives, and with Georgian, the language of wider communication which all Tsova-Tush speakers speak as a second language, in order to form hypotheses concerning which Tsova-Tush construction is inherited, and which has arisen under influence of Georgian. (3) To provide the most probable diachronic scenario of language contact, by looking at historical Tsova-Tush language data, as well as at its historical sociolinguistics.


This book provides a basic description of Tsova-Tush, in particular in the domain of spatial cases (which exhibit a two-slot system similar to Daghestanian languages), TAME categories (indentifying a Iamitive and a Past Subjunctive developing indirect evidential semantics), complex verbs, and subordination and clause-chaining (which in Tsova-Tush is finite).


In terms of language contact, this book concludes that (1) Tsova-Tush conforms to most established borrowing hierarchies and theories surrounding intensity of contact, except for the borrowing of a verbal inflection marker in a remarkably early stage of contact; (2) The Georgian influence that Tsova-Tush shows in sources from the 1850 suggest that a notable increase in bilingualism occured already at a point where there was little institutional or numeral dominance of surrounding the Georgian-language population. A change in ethnic self-identification can be the underlying factor for the early instances of contact-induced change.

Author Biography

Jesse Wichers Schreur, Leiden University
Jesse Wichers Schreur is a lecturer at Leiden University, teaching historical linguistics and Georgian. He completed his PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt. His main interests are languages of the Caucasus, historical linguistics, typology, and language contact. He publishes on grammatical gender, grammaticalisation, and basic description of languages of the Caucasus (especially Nakh and Kartvelian).
Book cover

Published

January 9, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Online ISSN

2699-0156

Print ISSN

2699-0148
Cite as
Wichers Schreur, Jesse. Forthcoming. Intensive language contact in the Caucasus: The case of Tsova-Tush. (Languages of the Caucasus). Berlin: Language Science Press.

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.