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Grammatical Interference in Late Seventeenth-Century Multilingual Language Description: A Contrastive Analysis of Russian, Latin, and German in the Dialogue Texts of Grammatica Russica (1696)

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study analyzes grammatical interference in the dialogue texts of Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf’s Grammatica Russica (1696), a trilingual text presenting Russian alongside Latin and German. Examining twenty-five examples across three grammatical domains — prepositions and case forms, negation and interrogative constructions, and personal pronouns — the analysis identifies the types, sources, and mechanisms of interference. Interference manifests as transfer, overgeneralization, and avoidance. Transfer and avoidance prove to be two sides of a single mechanism: where the reference languages possess corresponding structures, those structures are imported into Russian; where no correspondence exists, Russian-specific rules are suppressed. Exploiting the trilingual parallel structure, the study classifies interference sources into German-only (Type A), Latin-only (Type B), and joint interference (Type C), revealing that German operates predominantly at the lexico-grammatical level and Latin at the morphosyntactic level. Certain prepositional usages also suggest possible interference from other Slavic languages, highlighting the limits of a purely text-internal approach. The analysis further distinguishes interference from authentic traces of seventeenth-century spoken Russian and identifies strategic language use in Ludolf’s context-sensitive handling of second-person pronouns. By identifying the strata of interference, this study provides a foundation for distinguishing portions of the text that reliably reflect late seventeenth-century spoken Russian from those shaped by the author’s multilingual background.
DOI: 10.46694/jss.2026.3.41.1.333
Author: Jihyoung Han
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7155679658
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