Attrition and changes in the context of a language shift in Baltic-Finnic languages and dialects of Ingermanland

The article describes the main changes in the morphology and morphophonology of the Baltic-Finnic languages of Ingria in the context of a language shift. Criteria are proposed for distinguishing attritional changes from those caused by in trastructural tendencies. In the plane of morphophonology, the most frequent cases of attrition in these languages are idiolect-specific, with cases common for all idiolects across the area occurring rarer. Most often, attrition in morphophonology manifests it self as analogical levelling, e.g., when an anomalous adessive form lakel ‘on the ceiling’ is used instead of the regular luajel (nominative lak ‘ceiling’). On the other hand, the widespread use of hen-illatives and jaisi-conditionals in the West Hatsina dialect rather reflects intrastructural tendencies. The loss of some morphophonological alternation may reflect both attrition and influence from closely related dialects which lack such alternation. The disappearance of entire grammatical categories as a result of categorial levelling or categorial switching more often spans entire local idioms or even whole areas: for example, the abessive disappeared from the whole of Western Ingria. Other changes include the loss of the 1PL and 2PL possessive suffixes, the loss of the inessive of the infinitive II form, the loss of passive participles agreement, the loss of the 3rd person imperative, the loss of the synthetic conditional. In some cases, application of complex and opaque morphological rules can lead to disappearance of a whole grammatical category by precluding generation of surface forms like, e.g., that of the inessive of the infinitive II. On the other hand, the expansion of the imperfect suffix -si may be both a result of the Estonian language influence (as in Ingrian Finnish) and a substrate feature (as in Lower Luga Ingrian). An interesting in novation is neutralization of the opposition of the same case forms of the I, II, III and IV infinitives, which results in that in some idiolects the infinitive III may also have a translative form which Standard Finnish lacks.