The Language Personality of an Elderly Person through the Prism of Interference (On the Example of a Siberian Czech Dialect Speaker)

The research was conducted within the framework of the actively developing area of linguistics-linguopersonology. It is devoted to the phenomenon of the bilingual language personality of an elderly person (born in 1938) based in the polyethnic Middle Irtysh region. The basic concepts of the study include language contacts, bilingualism, and interference. Its aim is to investigate relevant features of a bilingual language personality, in particular, factors influencing the processes of interference in speech, as well as the axiological component of the "linguopersoneme". The research is based on the "live" speech recordings of ethnic Czechs made during the dialectological expeditions with the author's participation in 2000, 2004, and 2012. The analyzed material includes over 9,000 words (incl. 5000 words from the ninety-minute audio recordings of 2004 and 2012). The analysis shows that the informant inherited certain linguistic features from Siberian Czechs-speakers of the Middle Irtysh Czech dialect, which is his "family" language as well as the language of communication with his fellow villagers-ethnic Czechs. At the phonetic level, the features include the distant metathesis of liquid consonants. At the semantic-syntactic level, the features are the Czech speech system (sentences with generalized and personal semantics, etc.); the worldview characteristic of this dialect is also present. Recordings from different years show dynamic changes in the respondent's speech as a result of interlingual (closely related Czech and Russian languages) and interdialec-tal (surrounding Ukrainian, Russian old- and new-settlers', German, Estonian dialects) contacts. Interference shows in the acquisition of such phonetic features as akanye and ikanye, in the use of contracted forms of adjectives (typical of Russian old-settlers' dialects); lexical and semantic adaptation. The informant's bilingual thinking reflects common features of the old generation of bilingual Czechs in the Omsk Irtysh region. They include the preservation of cultural traditions (wedding ritual), nostalgic memories of the past (through the prism of "now and before"), actualization of basic values: work, life, family, education. Individual features of the bilingual informant include interest in the history of his family in connection with the history of the village as a whole, interest in the history of Czechs in Siberia; a high degree of linguistic reflection (through the opposition "us"- them"), expression of personal evaluation of linguistic phenomena. The language personality is a native speaker of the Russian-Czech dialect and a bilingual personality ("switching registers" depending on the addressee) formed under the influence of both linguistic (native dialect, trends in the development of the Russian language, the surrounding Ukrainian dialects, Russian Siberian old- and new-settlers' dialects) and extra-linguistic (sociocultural, historical and cultural) factors.

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