Involutionary Trends in Contemporary Teleut?

Abstract

The article is devoted to the language situation in the dwelling points of the Teleut, an autochthonous minority Turkic variety of South Siberia. The fieldtrip data collected in 2013-2014 enable to generally conclude about the preservation rate of Teleut in different age groups and basic spheres of its use. A large impact of the predominant Russian language on Teleut is detected resulting in the big amount of lexical borrowings, which have replaced the original lexicon, and the syntactical distortion of the Teleut speech. Asymmetrical Russian-Teleut bilingualism with the prevalence of Russian is claimed the main reason of this phenomenon.