Latgalistikys kongresu materiali, III. 2011. - Latvijas Universitāte

These three questions were chosen in an attempt to build an intergenerational
picture of linguistic use within the community. The answers do
not represent the particular linguistic habits of three generations, but are
meant to show the perceived language use of each respondent when in
conversation with age-defined members of the community, whom we assume
here to be representative of their age groups. The respondents’ ages
range from a minimum of 12 to a maximum of 80, therefore we have excluded
questions on family roles, such as language spoken with ‘grandparents’
or ‘own children’ since these labels can refer to people of very different
ages, depending on the age group of the respondent. For instance,
the children of the oldest informants may themselves be old, whereas the
‘external’ labels in our selected questions should provide an indication of
absolute age. For the same reason the question relating to the older generations
is not focused on grandparents, but on a precise and unambiguous
concept: ‘elderly relatives’. We also preferred ‘partner’ to, say, ‘brother’
or ‘sister’: apart from the possibility of large age differences between
brothers and sisters, sibling linguistic relationships are characterized by a
longer continuity of speech, and may be influenced by the past roles of the
speakers. ‘Partner’ is a more current and future-oriented role, as it were.
To better understand the nature of our data it should be kept in mind
that the patterns of interchange between the age groups surveyed are
somewhat overlapping: answers were collected from older respondents
speaking with both elderly people and children, younger respondents
speaking with older people and children, and so on. For instance, an informant
of 80 speaking with elderly people would be likely to view himself
as peer within that group and to have a partner from the same age
group, while we would expect a 12-year-old adolescent to feel very distant
from the ‘elderly relatives’ category. The difference in size between the
various demographic groups under study should also be noted: the majority
of respondents have only one partner, a small and limited number of
elderly relatives, but may encounter a potentially infinite number of young
children in their everyday social environment. Social and identity roles
should also be taken into account: the role of ‘partner’ or ‘elderly relative’
is typically in-group, while ‘children’ can be both in- and out-group, as we
will see for instance in the maintenance of Russian. Of course, as in any
study of relative chronology, there are three different time planes, albeit
synchronic. We could think of them as chronologically oriented, but only
by a process of abstraction. Given the subjective nature of the answers, this
abstraction gives us a better view of the future than of the past.
95