Code-Switching Practices in Judeo-Georgian Discourse

• In Event: Linguistic Analysis in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the phonetical, grammatical (syntactic and morphological), and lexical influences of modern Hebrew (a revived colloquial language, with official state language status) on Judeo-Georgian and discuss it within the frameworks of code-switching. For the above-mentioned purposes, we will use the linguistic analysis of the databases, which include both printed materials (newspapers (namely, Aliyah from Georgia) and pieces of prose (Botera, D. 2016), and the interviews with Georgian Jews, reccorded within the frameworks of several grant projects (Lomtadze, T. 2016, Janjgava Ts. 2022). The speech variety of Georgian Jews currently exists in Israel only, accordingly, all the materials presented in the paper, are collected and recorded in Israel.
Various articles, research, and books have been dedicated to code-switching to Hebrew from Russian, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, English, etc.. However, the only research, published in Israel, referring to Georgian Jews (Altman, 2007), investigates code-switching and crossover memories in maturing adults, applying the sociopragmatic-psycholinguistic distinction to show how different motivations account for code-switching in three groups of mature (ages 60–90) immigrant bilinguals (English-Hebrew, Russian-Hebrew, and Georgian-Hebrews) across the lifespan (Burstein-Feldman, 2009, 227). Geographical and social factors, affecting the distribution and usage of Judeo-Georgian historically in Georgia and currently in Israel have been analyzed by Israeli and Georgian scholars (Lomtadze, Enoch 2019; Lomtadze Guledani, 2023). However, no work has been done yet to address the additional areas of interest, like the in-depth linguistic layers of the code-switching phenomenon itself of this minority currently endangered language, to define the levels of code mixing and switching (morpheme, word and syntagm-level, intra and extra sentential) code-switches, the correlation between the level used and language proficiency or research variables, like age, gender, religion, education, profession, geographic (city/region of origin in Georgia and city/region of residence in Israel), etc.
This paper will try to fill in the gap in the extant literature and research sphere.

Authors

• Ani Kvirikashvili, University of Georgia

• Tamari Lomtadze, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University