Оценка языка-пиджина руссенорск глазами современного лингвиста<br>(Assessment of the pidgin Russenorsk (RN) seen with the eyes of a contemporary linguist)

• Main Author: Ingvild Broch
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Septentrio Academic Publishing 1998-02-01
• Series: Poljarnyj Vestnik: Norwegian Journal of Slavic Studies
• Subjects: Russian; language; socio-linguistics; pidgin languages; Russenorsk
• Online Access: https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/vestnik/article/view/1431

The first linguistic description of RN was published by Olaf Broch in German in 1927 in Archiv für slavishe Philologie and in the same year also in Norwegian, at the request of the editor of the Norwegian philological journal Maal og Minne. In 1930 he published the RN texts which were known then and which he had used as a basis for the description of 1927. Broch's interest in RN was concentrated on a pure description of this phenomenon, by him characterized as "a kind of language [...] a mixture of different constituents like the ones we know from different parts of the world under more or less the same conditions». We have passed through a period of comparing RN to other pidgins, establishing RN as a grammatical system with simple morphology, with a syntax that is far from being without rules, but its syntactical possibilities are restricted, as in other pidgins. The history of RN shows that as long as RN was the only means of communication between Norwegians and Russians in Northern Norway the assessment was positive, but when Norwegian merchants started learning Russian proper, RN lost its status as "the fourth language" in Northern Norway, and was characterized in the same derogatory way as colonial pidgins. RN, however, differs from them, in having a special status as a dual-sourced pidgin, while most Atlantic and Pacific pidgin, creoloid and post-creoloid languages have a single main source.This seems to stimulate to more extensive studies into the features of the pidgin and contact languages of the Arctic and the northern regions. Such investigations can hopefully lead to important modifications and necessary redefinitions of the theoretical models employed in pidgin and creole studies.