Ordinary metalinguistic reflection of the Germans in Siberia: based on field expeditions in the Novosibirsk region

The problem and the goal. The study is devoted to the problem of studying collapsing cultures and languages ​​by addressing the facts of explication of “folk” metalinguistic reflection. The aim of the work is to summarize the knowledge about the language of speakers of endangered archaic forms of the German language living in Siberia. Methodology. The work analyzes lexical tools that are, on the one hand, the central elements of the structure of a metalanguage utterance, and on the other hand, represent the dominant meanings of the system of ordinary language knowledge. In order to collect material, a dialectological survey was conducted for the first time in areas of the Novosibirsk Region of the Russian Federation with the highest proportion of the German population. In the course of the field work, a partially-structured narrative interview was used, which made it possible to assemble a corpus of metalinguistic utterances implemented using German dialects. When processing the actual material used statistical calculation, contextual analysis and cognitive modeling techniques. Results. It is revealed that at present, within the Novosibirsk region, secondary German dialects are preserved, whose speakers consider them to be native forms of the language and comprehend them in comparison with the modern German literary language and other language formations. Metalinguistic reflection is carried out according to the models “language as a means of communication of a certain group of people”, “language as a system of words” and “language as a system of sounds”. Each model assumes that one or another aspect of the language becomes the central object of reflection and the verbalization of this reflection is carried out in German dialect speech using a certain set of lexical means. Conclusion The conducted qualitative analysis of the metalanguage discourse in combination with the quantitative analysis allows us to conclude that everyday knowledge of German dialect carriers reflects a significant range of linguistic phenomena, but in essence they differ in many ways from systematic scientific knowledge. They dominate the utilitarian understanding of the language (language as a tool of communication). The most frequently mentioned language unit is the word. The material side of the language with its pronunciation features is also the object of reflection. The phenomena of the morphological and syntactic levels of the language system are interpreted by the Germans of Siberia indirectly.