Nina Dobrushina

The aim of the project is to work on methodology and representation of data about multilingualism and language contact across Daghestanian villages collected during field researches both in paper and on the web site. The project is based on a long-term 0ngoing field research conducted since 2009. In order to translate people’s personal recollections into quantitative data the method of retrospective family interviews is used. The data are obtained from the respondents concerning not only themselves, but also their deceased relatives who cannot be reached in person, thus getting information about multilingualism and language contact going back to the 19th century.

To reconstruct the patterns of language contact in the past, the cluster principle of data collection was used, which means working with several villages at one location rather than with one village per location. The results are summarized in articles which describe each cluster of villages, including a map of the cluster with charts showing levels of command for each of the languages. The article and the map together form a chapter of the future Atlas. The project suggests a descriptive standard to account for contact situations in a Daghestanian village, provides an account of each village or cluster of villages, provides an inventory of models of possible language contact situations in Daghestan, and reveals the role that socio-cultural factors may have played in sustaining linguistic diversity in Daghestan. On the global level, the project will contribute to studies of linguistically diverse areas of the world. The unique pattern observed in Daghestan is that of the strict linguistic endogamy, when marriages are confined to the same linguistic community.

The project to be carried out under EURIAS fellowship programme is aimed at working out a methodological framework for processing and representing the data and making it available to a vast academic audience. Currently the data exist in the form of and Excel database, which is not available online, of the papers surveying the clusters of villages, and of the maps. During the residence at the IAS, the structure of the chapters of Atlas will be discussed with scholars from different disciplines, the current versions of the chapters will be updated, and the web site for the Atlas will be elaborated.