Contaminated Russian Speech of Eastern Natives — 20^th Century Fiction Characters

The article features the way fiction writers depict direct speech of non-native characters who are fluent and able to communicate effectively with the native speaker characters. The investigation based on works written by Russian and one Polish author of the 20^th century shows how they imagined the speech of indigenous peoples of the Far East who had to talk in Russian. Numerous examples given in this article feature the interfering effect of their native tongues on the second Russian language. The work provides a typology of language means, representing the main kinds of distortions of the Russian speech made by native speakers (Yakut, Oroch, Udege, Nanai, Evenk). The aim of the article is to establish regular distortions in the contaminated Russian speech of the above-mentioned peoples shown in works of fiction. The main phonetical and graphical device is the change of the place of articulation substitution of palatodental by dental consonants. The most frequent grammatical devices include replacement of personal pronouns by possessive ones, violation of syntactic coordination, and of word order.

The paper also notes the cases of using native tongue inclusions, as well as certain specific adverbs and defines preponderance of grammatical devices over phonetical and graphical ones while conveying irregularities of speech of non-native speakers.