Quantifying Lexical Contact in Daghestan: Methods and Results

In historical comparative linguistics, the study of lexical borrowing has been at the same time methodologically sharp and non-systematic and largely remained a study of history of separate words. As compared to the ever growing sociolinguistic research on lexical borrowing involving one of the global languages, there are few attempts to develop methods of measuring the degree of lexical contact between linguistic minorities. The recent World Loanword Database project, based on collecting the same list of lexical items across languages of the world, aimed more at establishing a new standard for collecting basic vocabulary. Although the LWT list may be used for measuring lexical contact, in an effort to be universal it includes many regionally irrelevant lexical items as well as recent concepts not very useful to reconstruct language contact in the past. In this paper, I propose a rapid method for estimating lexical contact between the languages of Daghestan. The method is based on a short list of 252 words that derives from the list of the World Loanword Database (wold.clld.org), is adapted to the grounds and can be collected from several consultants within one day. Presenting several case studies, I argue that this shortlist is sensitive enough to detect and quantify differences in lexical contact across major areas (presence of Azerbaijani in the South and of Avar in the North) and individual languages within such areas (shows different sets of loans from the same major language to different neighboring minority languages).