Language Shift and Text Types: Reconfiguring the Ritual Language of Doukhobor Russians in Canada

Gunter Schaarschmidt (University of Victoria, Canada)
[BIO]

Abstract

The present investigation will concentrate on the mnemonic devices that are an essential means for transmitting oral texts across a generation of speakers as well as from generation to generation. Such devices in Doukhobor hymnody, especially the psalms, include alliteration, syntactic/semantic parallelism, and a set of Church Slavicisms as well as foreign-language and folkloristic phrasal elements. While such devices are translatable into English, there is a resulting clash between two levels of Canadian English: a very archaic ritual language and the kind of colloquial English used elsewhere by Doukhobors. Perhaps to avoid this clash, there is at present a tendency towards code-switching where in translated ritual language texts the devices of original Doukhobor oral texts are inserted in Russian in an otherwise colloquial English translation. These insertions no longer serve as mnemonic devices nor are they due to a lack of proficiency in the English language; rather, they are apparently an effort to maintain lost elements of culture. We may thus predict that this new text type will establish itself as a means of avoiding the death of Doukhoborism that has been said to occur when Russian is no longer spoken by the majority of its members.

1. Language loss

The loss of languages is often compared to the decimation and even­tual extinction of animal and plant species. For language, changes in envi­ronment would mean that, to quote Wurm (1991:3): the cultural and social settings in which a given language had been functioning, usually for a very long time, have been replaced by new and quite different ones as a result of irresistible culture contact and clash, with the traditional language unsuited for readily functioning as a vehicle of expression of the new culture.

And to continue with Wurm (1991:17): "With the death of a lan­guage..., an irreplaceable unit in our knowledge and understanding of human thought and world-view has been lost forever."

A linguistic community that faces the imminent death of its language is usually one in which all, or the large majority of its carriers are in their sixties or higher. As a rule, if the community is at all concerned about imminent language death, there are two camps of people: a) the "minimal effort" approach; and b) the "eleventh-hour approach".

In the first group, which encompasses mainly members of the younger generations, there is the belief that ethnicity can be retained even after the death of the language; in the second group, there is the belief that language maintenance is a conditio sine qua non for the retention of ethnicity. In bet­ween these two extremes there are combinations of both approaches. In the two language communities that we have worked with most extensively over the past 35 years, i.e., Sorbian in Germany and Doukhobor Russian in Canada, this is precisely the situation as both communities face language shift within the next two generations, earlier in some regions (for Sorbian, see ·atava 2005:17; for Doukhobor Russian, see Friesen and Verigin 1996:147).

A compromise approach between the above extremes is one where a linguistic community agrees to "sacrifice" certain stylistic levels such as, for Sorbian, the level of LSP (German Fachsprache) even though linguists have in theory adequately developed such a level (Elle 2002:42-44); or, for Doukhobor Russian, the dialect even though it is a vital part of ritual lan­guage. In Sorbian, this "sacrificed" level would then be replaced by German, in Doukhobor Russian, by Standard Moscow Russian and/or Canadian English. Failing this compromise approach, there is the choice of widespread, sporadic code-switching that is probably merely a short-term postponement of language death. This paper will discuss the viability of a "systematized" form of code-switching in Doukhobor ritual language that could go a long way towards retaining a reconfigured style, perhaps for at least as long as Latin had been able to survive in Catholic churches.

2. Doukhoborism

The year 1895 marked an important milestone in the roughly 165-year old history of the Doukhobor movement: a symbolic burning of firearms in the village of Orlovka in Transcausasia, an area to which the Doukhobors had been exiled from the Crimea by Tsar Nicholas I (for the origin of the terrm "Doukhobor" and a brief characterization of the belief system of the movement, see Schaarschmidt 2005:137-139). Tsar Nicholas II responded by launching a massive persecution campaign against the Doukhobors with the avowed goal of their extermination. Leo Tolstoy and Quaker friends in England intervened on behalf of the movement and came up with the funds to organize a mass emigration of 7,500 Doukhobors (appr. one third of the total Doukhobor population in Russia at the time) to Canada in 1899. After settling initially in the Province of Saskatchewan, roughly 5,000 Doukhobors moved to British Columbia between the years 1908-13 because of a dispute with the federal government over the way of acquiring land for the community. At present, there are about 26,000 Doukhobors in Canada (a higher estimate, i.e., 40,000, is given in Tarasoff 2002:ix): 12,300 in British Columbia, 8,000 in Saskatchewan, 3,000 in Alberta, and the rest in other provinces (figures given in Popoff 1983:117).

The Doukhobors’ belief system, or Doukhoborism, is anchored in their oral "literature", especially the psalms as laid down in the Zhivotnaja kniga duxoborcev ("The Book of Life of the Doukhobors") edited by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich (1909 [1954]).(1) As an example, we may cite Psalm No. 5 from a set of ten psalms entitled "From the Common Views of the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood" (taken, with corrections, from Mealing 1975:53):

In their first three decades in Canada, the psalms were not only re­tained in the original Russian form but also passed on orally even though they had been recorded in written form at the beginning of the 20th century. With mandatory schooling in English and the resulting gradual erosion of Russian language maintenance in the 1940s, Doukhobor hymnody was not only partly forgotten but also increasingly carried out in English.(2) In addi­tion, Canadian authorities had done their best to impress upon the Doukhobor community that "with the absence of a formalized written body of literature, their way of life was void of cultural content" (Friesen 1995:143). And, last but not least, competition from the "homeland", i.e., the frequent visitors since the 1990s from Russia, may have succeeded in reenforcing the Canadian Doukhobors’ self-deprecating attitude that their language is archaic, artificial, and deficient (see, for example, Golubeva-Monatkina 1997:35).

As a result, there is grave concern among a large number of members of the community today that if songs, psalms, and hymns are no longer transmitted in Russian, one cannot really speak of Doukhoborism any more. A small minority of community members, usually the Doukhobors outside the Province of British Columbia and members of the younger generation (29 years or younger), does not support the concept of language being a carrier of culture and belief (Friesen and Verigin 1996:147). The language dilemma has been summarized recently by Rak (2004:53):

For a people who have always transmitted their faith practices in terms of the Russian language, this [i.e., the increased use of English -GS] may mean that Doukhoborism will die when the language is no longer spoken by a majority of its members.

It may be worth while examining the linguistic structure of the psalms to determine just what will be lost in translation, and how one can still "find something deeply present in such potent texts, even through the mask of translation" (Mealing 1995:41).

3. The structure of ritual language

Singing is very important for the Doukhobor community. In essence, the psalms and prayers contain the main elements of a tradition that is not otherwise fixed in a written form. These oral works are composed in a very ancient, Russian Church Slavonic form of language that is often no longer comprehensible even to educated members of the community. In the last 40 years, many of the psalms and prayers have been disseminated in written form and, more recently, in English translation. Until that time, most of them were learnt by heart and enriched with regional elements depending on the ethnic neighbourhood in which the Doukhobors found themselves. As Sulerzhitsky (1982:99) puts it:

The Sunday reciting of psalms, besides having an instructive, prayerful si­gnificance, is at the same time an ongoing corrective process. If someone re­citing a psalm makes an error, not only of a word, but even in the order of words having no significance, he will be sure to be corrected by one or sometimes more voices. In the main, the base of the Doukhobor dogma - their view of the world - is stated in the psalms.

It is impossible within the scope of this paper to present a detailed history of Doukhobor Russian (but see Schaarschmidt 1995). Historical sources suggest that the Doukhobors came from various areas of the Russian Empire, including Central and Northern Russia, until they settled mainly in the Ukraine (Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav) and Southern Russia (Tambov). This convergence probably resulted in a mixture of dialects with Southern Russian dialects forming the core (including the Russian dialects of Eastern Ukraine). When they emigrated to Canada beginning in 1899, the particular form of Russian as used colloquially by the Doukhobors must have been systemati­cally distinct from other Russian dialects. Three more generations in Canada increased this distinctness in the absence of a direct influence by Standard Russian in the old country.Thus, Doukhobor Russian has some of the typical characteristics of South Russian e.g., h for g, omission of the third person present tense verbal suffix -t, and lexical items not found in Standard Russian (for details, see Schaarschmidt 1995:201-203). There are two major sources for the borrowing of words into Doukhobor Russian after settlement in Canada: the first is English as described in Harshenin (1964; 1967), the second Ukrainian. The psalms reveal a great deal about the linguistic evolu­tion of Doukhobor Russian; the Doukhobors’ oral tradition was composed primarily in a form of Russian Church Slavonic (not Old Church Slavonic, as suggested by Mealing 1972:16-17, or stylized Russian, as claimed, at least for recitative psalms, by Harshenin 1964: 39, fn. 3); Even though they are composed in Russian Church Slavonic, they have picked up elements of col­loquial Doukhobor Russian in their long oral tradition. Thus, a linguistic analysis can aid a great deal in elucidating many of the "obscure" passages or words that have defied translation or analysis. Two examples may suffice here to illustrate this point. In both cases, the Doukhobor vernacular has made its way into the Russian Church Slavonic of the psalms. The following excerpt is from the psalm "The Trumpets Speak with Thunder" (No. 320 in Mealing 1972:216-7).

"From [the time of] John the speaker-of-God, from [the time of] the Son of Thunder...the Evangelist’s Gospel [my translation; Mealing has "Evangelist of the Gospel"]. Let us come [Mealing has "we come"] into ri­ches [Mealing has, quite incorrectly, "we faithful ones"], to the Sapphire one we sing praise."

The phrase saxvernogo vosxvalim has puzzled the analysts; the adjec­tive saxvernyj was read by Bonch-Bruevich (1910; quoted here from Mealing 1972:217, fn. 3) to mean "Sapphire". Mealing suggests "honey-eater" (per­haps he was thinking of saxarny "sugary"), and his translator, Eli Popoff, omits the word altogether. It seems that Bonch-Bruevich had the right hunch here: the correct form of this word in Russian would be safirnogo, an adjec­tive based on the noun safir "Sapphire" (Fasmer 1971). The xv in the form found in the psalm is easily explained: the phoneme f in Doukhobor Russian alternates freely with xv (see also Harshenin 1961:64).

The second example comes from the healing psalm "Against Appendicitis" (Mealing 1972:299) where the form vikijane is dismissed as an obscure word (the form occurs at the very beginning of the psalm):

The form vikijane appears to be a repetition of okejane, but in the phonetic shape as used in the vernacular (cf. also the dialectal form kijan-more "ocean" that occurs in fairy-tales and charms; see, in this respect, Fasmer 1971). Furthermore, the syllable vik- for ok- might be due to (a) prosthesis of v; and (b) the (in this word unexpected) rendering of o in closed syllables in Ukrainian as i, cf. Ukrainian vikno "window" (Russian okno).

4. Ritual language reconfigured

4.1. Psalm No. 166

Since the psalms were handed on from generation to generation in oral form, they show many features of other forms of oral literature, specifically of poetry and folklore, such as a set of devices that facilitate oral transmit­tance. Psalm No. 166 may serve as a convenient example of the interplay of such devices and also as a template for the potential "functional" code-swit­ching as a means to reconfigure Doukhobor ritual language (see Section 4.3. below).

4.2. Untranslatable ("cultural substance") features

4.2.1. Postpositioning of adjectives

In Russian the postpositioning of adjectives is highly marked and is re­stricted to folklore, poetry, proverbs, sayings, and Church Slavonic. Yet this mixture of syntactic devices in the language of Doukhobor hymnody and their interaction with dialect syntax add to the purely cognitive meaning of expression as well as to the rhythm of the psalms and are thus part of Doukhobor culture. In Psalm No. 166, we find the postpositioning of adjec­tives in the rhythmic sequence lesy tëmnye "dark forests"...gory krutye "steep mountains"...morju chërnomu "black sea", followed immediately by the pre­positioned (short-form) adjectives bujny vetry "boisterous winds"...chërno more "black sea" and the prepositioned (long-form) adjective mladye junoshi "young youth", thus returning to the initial noun phrase with prepositioned adjectives mladye moi junoshi "my young youth". (3)

4.2.2. Church Slavicisms vs. the vernacular

In the text passage in 4.1. above, we find this mixture of styles, on the one hand, in the adjective mladye "young" nom pl vs. Russian molodye; and, on the other hand, in the preposition pered "before, in front of" vs. Church Slavonic pred. Another instance is the compound noun Erusalim-grad "the town of Jerusalem" vs. gorod "town, city". This again is a feature found not only in Doukhobor hymnody but in the vernacular as well.

4.2.3. Alliteration and parallelism

The alliterative parallelism of the verb phrases with the perfective re­flexives sbushevalis’ "raged", vskolyxalos’ "heaved", vosplakalis’ "cried out" contrasts with the imperfective, non-reflexive infinitives bushevat’ "to rage", volnovat’ "to surge", kolyxat’ "to heave". This rhythmic sequence is less concerned with the cognitive meaning of the passage in question than its con­textual meaning, a feature typical of folklore genres in Russian. That the threefold matchup is not quite symmetric semantically (vosplakalis’ vs. vol­novat’) is no doubt due to the conventions of the oral transmission of these psalms where for the sake of facilitating memorization, semantics is sacrificed in favour of phonetics.

4.2.4. Short form adjectives used attributively

The examples in question in the above passage are first and foremost bujny vetry "boisterous winds" , as opposed to Standard Russian bujnye vetry, and chërno more "black sea", as opposed to Standard Russian chërnoe more, as well as the mixed phrase velik stolb ognennyj "large, fiery pillar", as opposed to Standard Russian bol’shoj (or velikij) ognennyj stolb. This usage of short form adjectives (velik) in an attributive function, as opposed to their restriction to a predicative function in Standard Russian, was a regular fea­ture in Old Church Slavonic and was retained as a marked stylistic feature in poetry and Russian Church Slavonic as well as in the Doukhobor vernacular. The phrase above is semantically equivalent to Standard Russian bol’shoj ognennyj stolb but the rhythm and archaic connotation of the given con­struction are lost in the Standard Russian phrase and of course in the English translation as well.

4.2.5. Redundant use of the conjunction i "and"

This is a feature found widely in Old Church Slavonic and, at the op­posite end of the spectrum, in dialect syntax as well. Such usage constitutes a mixture of coordination and subordination and is highly marked in the phrase in question, i.e., ot zemli i do neba lit.: "from the earth and to the sky". As the translation shows, trying to render this feature will result in an ungrammatical English equivalent.(4)

4.3. Code-switching as a means to reconfigure ritual language

Since the command of Russian is increasingly lost across the current three generations of Doukhobors, there is a tendency to shift to English in the performance of ritual functions. At least for the Doukhobors in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, however, a total shift is still considered to be incompatible with their belief system and singing practice. At this time, the prevailing practice in British Columbia seems to be that third-generation Doukhobors adher to the Russian Church Slavonic and the discourse struc­ture of hymnody, the second generation already uses translations at least half the time, and the younger generation prefers translations.

In order to avoid a total shift in the middle generation and to revitalize at least partial Russian-language use in the younger generation, there is a way to formalize and "legitimize" the actual practice of code-switching so that the primarily rhetoric devices of the ritual language are retained in their Church Slavonic form while the "meaning-carrying" parts of the text could be sung in English. Thus Mealing’s "translation" might look something like (5):

Apart from the decision, following either actual practice or agreed-upon convention, which parts of a given text are considered to be mnemonic devices, there is also the question as to the retention of purely grammatical features of the Russian language. For example, in the above we have given the options morju chërnomu, i.e., the dative case as in the original, and more chërnoe, the nominative/accusative. With the disappearance of the dialect (al­ready somewhat "simplified" in terms of case use as opposed to Standard Russian and the ritual language(5)), a knowledge of case government rules can no longer be taken for granted. In the above passage, either the dative or the accusative will suit the rhythm of the passage. In most cases, however, unless the rhythmic structure of a psalm requires a case other than the nominative/accusative, the latter should be considered the preferred gramma­tical category.

There may be some doubt as to whether the proposed type of "functional code-switching" is a workable solution to preventing a complete language shift for Doukhobor ritual language. Such "functional code-switching" is, however, far from unique in situations of bi- or multilingualism. For example, even in situations where a language is not en­dangered, such as Tagalog-based Pilipino in the Philippines, there is appa­rently a need for code-switching in Metro-Manila for the level of business Fachsprache (LSP or "language for specific purposes"). And judging from business experience, such code-switching has been very successful in a situa­tion where a level of Fachsprache exists theoretically but is little used due to the lack of sufficient published literature (see Pascasio 1978). Similarly, in the Sorbian-German bilingual situation, linguists have produced a large number of terminological dictionaries or glossaries covering every Fachsprache for Sorbian (an endangered language like Doukhobor Russian) from religion to botany; yet, when asked why they don’t use exclusively Sorbian in stores with Sorbian-speaking employees, they responded that they just did not know all the terminology (Elle 2002:43). Again, code-switching here is pre­ferable to a complete shift to German. And last but not least, when politi­cians give addresses in Canada to their constituents, anglophone speakers will do their part in French and give the rest of the address in English, and, conversely, francophone speakers will do their part in English and give the rest of the address in French (they may occasionally switch in mid-stream). Thus, "functional code-switching" is an established practice in situations where there is a need to use a level of Fachsprache, be it religious/ritual lan­guage, business, or politics.

5. Conclusion

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Doukhobor Russians in Canada find themselves at a crucial stage in the maintenance of their lan­guage, i.e., they are facing a shift from a rate of 60% to one of 30% of main­tenance, possibly within the span of one generation, at best two generations. There is already significant language shift in the Saskatchewan group of Doukhobors, not to mention even the isolated population segments in Alberta. Thus far, language use has been most vigorous in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia.

Over the past two and one-half centuries, the Doukhobors have deve­loped specific text types suited ideally to an oral tradition. These text types have been maintained well beyond the Doukhobors’ emigration to Canada beginning in 1899; they are being maintained today by the older generation of Doukhobors essentially in their original form and in the original Russian Church Slavonic as part of Doukhobor hymnody (see Schaarschmidt 2005) as well as a unique form of autobiographical composition (see Rak 2004). However, in order to allow the younger generations of Doukhobors that have undergone partial or massive language shift to participate fully in ritual activities, much of Doukhobor hymnody is now available in English transla­tion and is often performed in that language at festivals and regular Sunday services.

The present investigation has concentrated on the mnemonic devices that are an essential means for transmitting oral texts across a generation of speakers as well as from generation to generation. Such devices in Doukhobor hymnody, especially the psalms, include alliteration, syntactic/semantic parallelism, and a set of Church Slavicisms as well as foreign-language and folkloristic phrasal elements. While such devices are translatable into English, there is a resulting clash between two levels of Canadian English: a very archaic ritual language and the kind of colloquial English used elsewhere by Doukhobors. Perhaps to avoid this clash, there is at present a tendency towards code-switching where in translated ritual lan­guage texts the devices of original Doukhobor oral texts are inserted in Russian in an otherwise colloquial English translation. These insertions no longer serve as mnemonic devices nor are they due to a lack of proficiency in the English language; rather, they are apparently an effort to maintain lost elements of culture.

© Gunter Schaarschmidt (University of Victoria, Canada)

NOTES

(1) Here and elsewhere, we are using a transliteration system that constitutes a hybrid between IPA and the Library of Congress system. Specifically, to avoid diacritics, we are using sh, zh, ch; howver, as in the IPA system, we have retained j, c, x.

(2) There is regional variation in this respect. For example, the festivities connected with Peter’s Day in Castlegar, British Columbia, in 2004 were conducted primarily in Russian (as evidenced by the author), while those same festivities in Saskatchewan were conducted almost entirely in English (private communication by Larry Ewashen, Director of the Doukhobor Museum in Castlegar, British Columbia).

(3) Note that the postpositioning of adjectives can be found extensively in the English spoken by Doukhobors in the 1930s and was a productive feature in the their Russian as well (see Schaarschmidt 2005:146-147).

(4) This redundant use of the conjunction i"and" was noted in the English dialect of the Doukhobors in the late 1930s but had disappeared completely within a generation (see O’Neail 1962:141).

(5) One might mention here, the generalization of the masculine genitive plural ending -ov for all genders and the replacement of the zero ending in the accusative singular of feminine i-stem nouns, such as zhizn’ "life", with the ending -u, resulting in the coalescence of the accusative and instrumental singular. See also Schaarschmidt 2005:141.

REFERENCES

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1.4. Reproduktionen und Innovationen in Sprache und Kommunikation verschiedener Sprachkulturen / Reproduction and Innovation in Language and Communication in different Language Cultures

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