Digging into Family Root Similarities

As my last blog post I wanted to bring attention to my family roots, the dialects of the Polish and Ukrainian language.  My father’s side is Polish and my mother’s side is Ukrainian. Both have made comments here and there, mentioning that both languages are quite similar.  But in what ways? I began to dig, asking my very Ukrainian grandmother and doing some research on my own.  This is what I found, both Polish and Ukrainian are Slavic languages from the Indo-European family.  And during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukraine came under the domination of Poland this resulted in cultural Polonization.  Gradually, the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish.  As a result, many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language.  This could explain why the west of the modern day Ukraine has much closer vocabulary and dialect use of the Polish language.  To get technical, both Ukrainian and Polish orthography is largely phonetic. There is a consistent correspondence between their spelling system of language, sounds, and letters.  As for grammar, both languages have a relatively free word order, and are considered a highly inflected language.  This meanings a language that changes the form or ending of some words due to the way they are used in a sentence.  There are no articles, and often subject pronouns are dropped.  Adding to that, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals are inclined by numbers, cases, and gender. 

I watched an interesting video of a man who spoke Polish and a women who spoke Ukrainian, trying to have a simple conversation.  It was interesting the way the women picked up on a few common spoken words.  I recommend watching about 5 or so minutes since the video is so long.  Let me know what you thought and if you know any other slavic languages who are also similar.  Or feel free to express your family’s roots if they have any correspondence to one another. 

Language Stratification

After reading the chapter, I have come to conclusion that language differences and class divisions are almost inevitable.  In recent decades, research has shown across low, middle, and high SES groups that your parent’s language input directly effects their children’s language output.  According to Hart and Risley’s study, the amount of language young children are exposed to correlates with SES.  Children who come from highly successful families, significantly speak more on average to those from working-class or poverty level families.  Depending on your SES, it is likely young children may lag behind or not communicate effectively due to the parent’s phonological variables.  Considering the social distribution of language in New York, there seems to be more prestige with the consonantal [r] in the word “car” compared to the word “car” with the absence of the [r].  This is a great example of how the normal working of society have produced systematic differences.  Socioeconomic scales have been subjected to scrutiny and seem to focus on superficial measures.  But, it’s hard not to admit that socioeconomic status has a strong correlation to language differences.  In order to better understand the features of “high-quality” input, examining words, sounds, sentences, and social contexts can influence an individual’s language learning, especially as a child.  Many people defy the odds and are exceptions to this link between socioeconomic status and language variation. 

Furthermore, what kind of factors contribute to these SES discrepancies? Stratification? Have you known someone who has defeated the odds against the link between language differences and SES?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5901657/