Lietuvos istorijos institutas

This article attempts to verify the historically set axioms associated with the lengthening of vowels in word endings and its origin that are still popular in the normative tradition of Lithuanian linguistics; first of all, it posits that language contact affects the duration of vowels of Lithuanian mother tongue speakers in Vilnius and that lengthening of vowels thus originates from Russian and Polish. The article compares the pronunciation of three groups of Vilnius residents: 1) Lithuanian (those who grew up in Lithuanian-speaking families), 2) bilingual (those who grew up in a family where only one of the parents was Lithuanian and both Lithuanian and Russian / P olish or another Slavic language were used) and 3) native Russian and Polish speakers. The formulated hypothesis is that if longer endings occur in the speech of native Lithuanian speakers because of the influence of Slavic languages, those respondents who grew up in bilingual families and spoke Lithuanian and Russian or Polish at home would produce a longer /i/ and /u/ than native Lithuanian speakers from monolingual Lithuanian families. After comparative analysis of the stressed vowel duration in endings produced by respondents of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, it became evident that language contact was not the reason why native Lithuanian speakers produce not only short, but also long vowel variants in word endings. The instrumental values of the vowel durations produced by respondents who grew up in bilingual families were not significantly different from those produced by those who grew up in families speaking only Lithuanian. Thus, this feature is the same in the speech of both groups of respondents. Furthermore, the instrumental values of the vowel durations produced by respondents from these two groups were significantly different from the values of the vowel durations produced by native Russian or Polish speakers when speaking Lithuanian. In conclusion, the investigation of the genesis of lengthening in the word ending has disproven the assertion that ending lengthening originated from intense language contact between Lithuanian and Russian, Polish, and other Slavic languages spoken by the ethnic minorities of Lithuania. It is clear that the Slavic languages, which are non-native for Lithuanians or one of the native languages for Vilnius residents from bilingual families, do not, on their own, influence the duration of stressed /i/ or /u/ in the word ending. If lengthening of these vowels spread because of intense language contact, the occurrence of these lengthened variants would not be as rare in Vilnius speech as it currently is. It is possible, however, that other types of language contact could explain the vowel lengthening in word endings. In future research, there are two potential hypotheses that could explain how language contact might have affected ending lengthening in the speech of Vilnius residents. They are both connected with lengthening by non-native Lithuanian speakers. One might wonder whether lengthening could have originated when the ancestors of Vilnius residents transitioned from speaking some Slavic language to speaking Lithuanian on an individual or family level at the end of the 19th century or in the first half of the 20th century. In this case, some Vilnius residents could have inherited lengthening as a mother tongue norm. It is also possible that lengthening in the ending originated as an indicator of an in-group member identity in the post-World War II period, especially among workers in the manufacturing industry. During that period, intense expansion of factories and russification took place and many blue-collar Russian and Russian-speaking workers settled in Vilnius. When speaking Lithuanian, they were probably producing longer vowel endings and this pronunciation could have become an internal code of the group.