Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The study explores reflections of language power (LP) in the social and linguistic domains. Social context is examined in the light of the Tsovatush-Georgian bilingual environment and linguistic context – in the light of the interference and code-switching theories. The issue is studied with the example of the Tsovatush-Georgian language pair, which represents the dominant and subordinated languages towards one another from the social and linguistic viewpoints. The relationship between them displays that the language power may vary from one domain of language use to the another in different ways. The Georgian language has inimitably high social status compared to the Tsovatush (Bats), which is one of the main reasons that this latter is shifting to the Georgian language for more than two centuries. In turn, in the bilingual conversations conducting by the Tsovatush people, the matrix language is the Tsovatush and not the Georgian, in spite of that, at present, the elder generation of the Tsovatush people has been on the stage of descending bilingualism, knowing the Georgian language better than the mother tongue. Using the recognized quantitative and qualitative research methods, the paper summarizes the outcomes of the nine-year investigation, based on the tremendous material obtained from fieldwork, conducted several times, since 2010. The actuality of the research is conditioned by threats minority languages face in the globalized world.