The Atypical Utterance Prosody of the Northern Russian Dialects of the White Sea, an Endangered Language Variety in a Language Contact Area

The study of utterance prosody of spontaneous speech is an underdeveloped area of linguistic research, but new technology and methods to record and analyse living speech empirically have made this kind of research far more accessible. The rapidly disappea ring traditional Russian dialectal features should be recorded before they have gone lost forever. High-quality recordings of longer stretches of spontaneous Russsian dialectal speech are almost non-existent, despite the fact that they are indispensable f or several areas of linguistic research, including prosodic studies. Preliminary studies of the traditional dialect of the village of Varzuga (Ter Coast of the White Sea; Post 2001; forthcoming) have shown that the dialect has typical Northern Russian pro sodic peculiarities, the most interesting of which is the relative prominence of the phonological word, at the expense of larger prosodic units. The prosodic structure of the Varzuga utterance is similar to that of other Northern Russian dialects, but its form is different, due to a highly frequent use of an unusual repeating falling pitch pattern on each phonological word, which often obscures the perception of both lexical stress and of the nuclear pitch accent, phenomena which are easily detected in St andard Russian and most other Russian dialects. The research project aims at providing empirical evidence for the observed prosodic phenomena, and compare the speech varieties of several villages of the White Sea area. They are considered to form a single dialect, but they are expected to show minor differences in the phonetic realisation of the prosodic structure, which might be due to varying influence from the neighbouring Karelian, Sámi and Komi languages. Newly developed systems for the annotation of intonation and prominence in speech varieties (ToRI; IViE) will be applied to describe and classify these dialect varieties. The resulting recordings will be a valuable source of data for both the project partners.