ABSTRACT
In independent Estonia, the role of Russian has undergone considerable changes: it stopped being the language of politics, army, and legislation. It has survived in the dialects, in the mass media, on the Internet, and in cultural production, e.g., in fiction, theater, songs. It is present in daily life, education, scholarship, and interactions in formal settings. Russian is constantly in contact with Estonian which functions as the sole state language and so has more diverse functions in public settings. Therefore, there is a strong Estonian impact on the local variety of Russian.
The ethno-linguistic observations forming the basis of this study point to the existence of an invariant text/discourse created by the imaginary “typical” representative of the diaspora. This text has its own specific features that can be analyzed from formal, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. It is characteristic of the speech of language users and reflects their “worldview” and their naïve-linguistic conceptualization of the world. Previous research has shown that the Russian speaker pays particular attention to various zones of reality and conceptualizes them in a specific manner, such as: spatial-temporal localization (the relations Estonia – Russia – the West; «us» — «them»; significant locations; time: new/old; historical periods, time in information space); linguistic reflection (metalinguistic units that reflect co-existence, language acquisition); evaluation; self-identification. These components are closely interrelated: they often intersect and constitute a holistic complex. This chapter focuses on spatial localization, i.e., on those variants of toponyms that are used in formal and informal communicative situations, and on some occurrences of spatial localization in the dialects of Old Believers in Estonia. These dialects have existed and developed in Estonia for more than three centuries; therefore, they reveal what linguistic processes take place in the environment of a different language and culture.
Material for this study has been drawn from texts representing different discourse types and different aspects of diasporic linguistic activities: media texts and business documents, internet posts and memoirs, pedagogical texts and samples of everyday speech. Analyses include fiction and non-fiction, as well as dialect texts. The methodology of the study is multifaceted; its key concepts are a functional approach, semantical, cognitive and derivational analysis, discursiveness and intertextuality.
