CONTACT-INDUCED PHENOMENA IN THE SOVIET DOCUMENTS FROM THE FAR EASTERN KRAI (1920S—1930S)

This paper examines the Russian language used in offi cial documents from the Far Eastern Krai, dating back to the 1920s–1930s. Some of the documents’ authors were native speakers of Tungusic languages, such as Nanai, Udihe, Ulch, or Evenki, while others were native Russian speakers. This allows for a comparative analysis of texts produced by speakers of different linguistic backgrounds. The documents exhibit numerous spelling, morphological, and syntactic deviations from the norms of Standard Russian. The study analyzes these deviations and their possible causes. Additionally, it compares archival data from written documents with more recent oral corpora of Russian as spoken by native Tungusic speakers. Some spelling errors reflect diff erences in consonant inventories and syllable structures between the authors’ native languages and Russian. Other errors, such as mixing adjectives and adverbs, nominative marking of direct objects, or transferring dependent case marking from verbs to verbal nouns, also result from the author’s native language interference. Conversely, the omission of the postfix -ся or the omission of prepositions in temporal phrases may be attributed to regional variant of Russian. Finally, some linguistic phenomena are justified by the fact that the authors were still learners of Russian. The study also considers the potential influence of the Russian-Chinese pidgin on the texts.