“SPEAK NANAI!” CODE-SWITCHING IN TEXTS IN AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE

The paper deals with structural features of code-switching in a specific situation of narrative production in the half-remembered “native” language. The data involved in the study is a sample of texts with numerous switches between Nanai and Russian, recorded from one of the last speakers of Gorin Nanai. In the paper, I discuss two relevant points on these data. First, I analyze the contexts of code-switching causation (listeners’ direct or indirect requests on code-switching). The frequency, length, structural features of the reaction-switches and their differences from spontaneous switches are in focus. Second, I describe Russian sentences attested in texts with intensive code-switching as a target of the “crosslinguistic priming” (the grammatical influence of the other language involved in the text). Some of the Russian fragments attested in the text sample can be interpreted as a case of code-switching (or rather register-switching) between a more standard variety of Russian and a pidgin-like variety.