This article engages with the negotiation of Russian history and culture, focussing on concept tradition. Instead contesting tradition as it is used by state authorities, members Muslim minority in Russia tend to indicate claim their own distinct from a new national culture stressing Orthodox Christianity Slavic origins. By undertaking pilgrimage sacred sites south Perm Krai, believers U...

The study of the Greek language is argued here to be of relevance to Slavic studies and Slavic linguistics in several ways. After a brief presentation of some of the more important connections between Greek and the Slavic linguistic world, the focus is turned to one in particular that has not commanded the attention it might, namely the fact that Greek has historically been spoken and continues...

The present study poses the question on what phonetic and phonological grounds postalveolar fricatives in Polish can be analyzed as retroflex and whether postalveolar fricatives in other Slavic languages are retroflex as well. Velarization and incompatibility with front vowels are introduced as articulatory criteria for retroflexion, based on crosslinguistic data. According to these criteria, P...

The human language processing mechanism shows a remarkable robustness to different kinds of imperfect linguistic signals. However, it is unclear how exactly a message encoded in one system is decoded by persons used to a different system. We are interested in gaining insights about human performance at retrieving information encoded in an unfamiliar encoding system. Our focus lies on reading in...

In recent years, various approaches, hierarchies and models have been developed whichclaim to adequately describe and explain the lexical and structural effects of language contact.Thomason’s Borrowing Scale (e.g. 2001) has been frequently – and critically – cited. However,works which should also be noted in this field include, among others, Johanson’s Code-CopyingModel (e.g. 20...

In 1858 William Ripley recalled an important nineteenth century assumption: In our school d&ys most of us were brought up to regard Asia as the mother of European people. We were told that an ideal race of men swarmed forth from the Himalayan highlands, disseminating culture right and left as they spread through the barbarous West. The primitive language, parent of all the varieties of speech--...

The theory of symbolic racism places its origins in a blend of anti-Black affect and conservative values, particularly individualism. We clarify that hypothesis, test it directly, and report several findings consistent with it. Study 1 shows that racial prejudice and general political conservatism fall into 2 separate factors, with symbolic racism loading about equally on both. Study 2 found th...

Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using individual level data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors associated with low trust are: (i) a recent history of traumatic experiences; (ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (blacks in particular) and, to a lesse...