Discourse particles of Latvian-origin in Courland Livonian

• In Event: Livonian Linguistic Heritage

Abstract

Courland Livonian is a critically endangered language with approximately 40 L2 speakers left (Ernštreits 2013: 15). Over the years, Courland Livonian has been strongly influenced by neighbouring Latvian. Although there has been parallel research on Latvian and Livonian as close contact languages (see, e.g., Wälchli 2001, Halling 2006, Ernštreits & Kļava 2014), there has been little research on Livonian with the special focus on discourse particles so far (see Grünthal 2015 and Tomingas 2022).

Previous studies mention the discourse particles of Latvian-origin riktig ‘actually, exactly’, nekā ‘like’, and nu ‘well’ (Tomingas 2022). Due to the influence of the Latvian particle nu ‘well’, it is more frequently occurring in Livonian than similarly used no ‘well’, which is spotted in many other Finnic languages. The particle riktig originates from German richtig ‘right, correct’, but Livonian has borrowed it through Latvian riktīgs ‘right, proper, actual’. The particle nekā has previously been compared to Latvian conjunction ka ‘that’ (Kettunen 1938: 244), but also the influence of Latvian kā ‘like’ or nekā ‘than’ is possible.
The presentation focuses on explaining the possible development of the particles riktig, nekā and nu, comparing them also to their Latvian lexical equivalents. Secondly, the particle examples in spoken Courland Livonian are looked at to give an overview of their syntactic and pragmatic use in the past decades. The research material comes from the audio recordings in the University of Tartu Archives of Estonian Dialects and Kindred Languages (AEDKL), the recordings with six different native speakers are used.

Short Bio

Marili Tomingas is a research fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She has written her doctoral thesis on the use of Courland Livonian pro-forms in spoken language. She has been transcribing recordings with the last native speakers of Courland Livonian to be able to use spoken Livonian data in her research. Marili's main research interests are lexical variation, pragmatic functions of demonstratives and discourse particles, and Latvian and Estonian influence on Livonian. Currently she is working at the research project "Discourse particles in Uralic" where she is researching the use of Courland Livonian discourse particles.

Author

• Marili Tomingas, University of Tartu