La categoria di dialetto sociale nella linguistica sovietica degli anni Venti e Trenta del Novecento: il contributo della Scuola leningradese

The present dissertation focuses on the development of social dialectology in the background of Soviet social linguistics of 1920-1930s, illustrating how and why the category of social dialect rooted in the linguistic discourse. In detail, we examine the contribution of the Leningrad linguists Lev Ščerba (1880-1944), Evgenij Polivanov (1891-1938), Lev Jakubinskij (1892-1945), Boris Larin (1893-1964), Viktor Žirmunskij (1891-1971), to the debate about social differentiation of language, highlighting their interpretation of the notion of social dialect. By adopting the methodological approach of compared epistemology proposed by Patrick Sériot (1999), and analyzing some selected primary texts, we aim at clarifying the chronological background and the geo-ideological space, that made the discourse on social dialects epistemologically licit in the USSR of 1920s-1930s. In order to reconstruct these two components, we resort to comparison. In our case, this will take place on three levels: first, the selected works of the Leningrad linguists are compared with each other; secondly, they are related to the texts of their precursors, in particular, Baudouin de Courtenay; thirdly, they are compared with the works of contemporary linguists, who also expressed themselves on the subject of social dialects. The dissertation consists in two parts, respectively articulated into two chapters. In Chapter I we try to clarify the terminological and conceptual dispersion that affects the category of social dialect in modern Soviet-Russian and Western sociolinguistics. In Chapter II we outline some theoretical premises, which paved the way for the discourse on social dialects. We characterize how the category of dialect was subjected to revision at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, against the background of the crisis in which historical-comparative linguistics had run into. It is shown that already at that period the notions of social dialect, class dialect, circulated, albeit sporadically, alongside the traditional notion of territorial dialect. Analyzing Baudouin de Courtenay’s linguistic conception, we observe how he contributed to this revision process. Turning our gaze to Russian dialectology at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, we see that Baudouin de Courtenay was not the only one who thought of linguistic variation in its social dimension. In the Second Part of the dissertation – the true fulcrum of our research – we illustrate how in the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet linguistics a debate on social dialects took place de facto with a collective and systematic scope. In Chapter I the sociological turn in Soviet linguistics of the first decades of the 20th century is exposed. Wishing to retrace the evolution followed by Leningrad scholars’ reflection about the social nature of language, we deepen some salient texts dating back to the first half of the Twenties. It emerges that already in the early 1920s the idea of the social stratification of language was latent in the theoretical baggage of the Leningrad linguists. Particular attention is then paid to the second half of 1920s, when a real discourse focused on the diastratic variation in language and, therefore, on social dialects, was activated, under the influence of the French sociological school, as entrusted to the texts of Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes, Charles Bally, Lazare Sainéan, Marcel Cohen etc. Since the mid-Twenties the debate on the social variation in language became increasingly permeable with respect to the political context, intertwining with the theoretical legitimacy of linguistic policy. In Chapter II we focus on the texts published in the late Twenties and the early Thirties. It is shown how the discourse on social dialects changed against the background of increasingly heated discussions on the possibility of founding a Marxist linguistics, affected by the rise of Marrism to official linguistic theory, which advocated the idea of the class character of language. In summary, the analysis conducted allows us to demonstrate that between the second half of the 1920s and the early 1930s in Soviet linguistics a systematic and collective discourse on the problem of the social differentiation of language effectively took place. In particular, it can be seen that the notion of social dialect underwent a semantic evolution between the 1920s and 1930s. Both in Soviet social linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in modern Soviet-Russian sociolinguistics the interpretation of the category oscillates between two poles: on the one hand, social dialect means a set of linguistic peculiarities, primarily lexical and phraseological, which arose for communicative or expressive purposes, within a restricted social group; on the other hand, it refers to social varieties of the common linguistic repertoire. To stem the terminological-conceptual dispersion, we conclude the dissertation with some synoptic tables.