The paper investigates processes of phonological adaptation of Russian borrowings in Avar-Andic languages with an aim to determine what factors affect degrees of integration.
Methodology, Data and Analysis:
We analyzed Russian borrowings from ten dictionaries of Avar-Andic languages. Each borrowing was annotated and matched segment-by-segment to its corresponding Russian source lexeme. We performed a qualitative analysis of the correspondences and modeled them with a mixed effect logistic regression.
Findings:
The analysis demonstrates that variation in degrees of phonological adaptation depends on multiple factors, both language-internal (i.e., related to syllable structure and repair strategy preferences) and language-external (i.e., time depth of the borrowing).
Originality:
This is the first quantitative investigation of phonological adaptations of Russian borrowings in Avar-Andic languages.
Implications:
Our findings have implications for studies on language contact, and more specifically contribute to research on loanword adaptation in multilingual settings.
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