Dagestani Russian (russian: Дагестанский русский) is a regional variety of the Russian language spoken in Dagestan, a constituent republic of the

Russian Federation Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...

, and some of the neighboring regions including Astrakhan Oblast and Kalmykia. It is characterized by heavy influence from

vernacular language A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

s, mostly those belonging to the

Northeast Caucasian The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as ...

and Turkic

language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...

. It is considered a low prestige language and is mostly used in informal domains.

Features

Dagestani Russian is an

umbrella term In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy () is a semantic relation between a hyponym denoting a subtype and a hypernym or hyperonym (sometimes called umbrella term or blanket term) denoting a supertype. In other wor ...

for a broad group of vernacular-influenced and often partly creolized Russian varieties, rather than a single

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

with easily identifiable and describable traits. The degree of difference from standard Russian varies between speakers depending on their age, education, occupation, location and other social factors. Most of the differences come from the influence of local minority languages, so it also matters which of the vernaculars one speaks. Even though Russian is a

second language A person's second language, or L2, is a language that is not the native language (first language or L1) of the speaker, but is learned later. A second language may be a neighbouring language, another language of the speaker's home country, or a fo ...

for many Dagestanis, and thus Dagestani Russian is often a non-native accent, it is not always the case. With the rapid urbanization in the area, Dagestanis born in ethnically and linguistically diverse cities to parents originating from more monoethnic and monolingual rural areas may acquire a heavily vernacular-influenced Russian variety as their first language while not speaking their heritage languages natively. One of the most common traits of Dagestani Russian varieties is frequent use of the constructions () and () and their contracted forms (žijes) and (ježži). They are used as

topic marker A topic marker is a grammatical particle used to mark the topic of a sentence. It is found in Japanese, Korean, Quechua, Ryukyuan, Imonda and, to a limited extent, Classical Chinese. It often overlaps with the subject of a sentence, causing con ...

s, a concept absent from standard Russian but common in vernacular languages of the area. These expressions are also considered iconic of the dialect and are often used as a marker of regional identity, an example being the Dagestani cuisine restaurant "Жи Есть" in

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...

. Another common feature is the unusual handling of Russian

reflexive verb In grammar, a reflexive verb is, loosely, a verb whose direct object is the same as its subject; for example, "I wash myself". More generally, a reflexive verb has the same semantic agent and patient (typically represented syntactically by the s ...

s. Most vernacular languages lack the concept, so many Dagestani Russian speakers are not used to it and subsequently "misuse" such verbs, speaking from the perspective of a standard Russian speaker. On the one hand, the reflexive suffix may be dropped where it is necessary in standard Russian. On the other hand, it may appear where it usually does not.Daniel, M. & Dobrushina, N
A corpus of Russian as L2: the case of Daghestan
2013.

Phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

and

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

differences from the standard language are a common occurrence in Dagestani Russian. For example, the word () 'brother', commonly used in the dialect, is a loanword from Avar. Unlike standard Russian, Avar has the phoneme (

voiced labio-velar approximant Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to re ...

) in its

phonemic inventory In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...

, and it is also used in that word in Dagestani Russian.

References

{{Russian dialects Dagestan Languages of Russia Russian dialects