Tāmnieku dialekta savdabība kā Kurzemes reģionālā diskursa zīme mūsdienu latviešu bērnu literatūrā: Arnolda Auziņa un Ulda Ausekļa dzejas piemērs

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of one of the identifiers of regional literature – the use of local language. The goal of the article is to establish and interpret the nuances and meaning of the use of the Livonian dialect in the poetry of two popular authors of modern Latvian children’s literature – Uldis Auseklis (1941) and Arnolds Auziņš (1931). The analysis of literary texts is based on the work (opinions on idioms, dialects and the use of their features in fiction) of several researchers of regional culture – Keith David Malcolm Snell, Anna Mlekodaj –, and Latvian scholars – Kārlis Mīlenbahs, Marta Rudzīte, Ieva Ozola, Alberts Sarkanis, Dace Strelēvica-Ošiņa and others. The examples of Auseklis’s and Auziņš’s poetry analyzed in the study reveal that in modern Latvian children’s literature, specificially in poetry, dialects are one of the sources of language enrichment and that poets use them consciously and skillfully. Both poets demonstrate a convincing sense of the peculiarities of the Livonian dialect, however, the use of the dialect is influenced by the knowledge of the authors: if the dialect is the language of the author’s native region, then the texts written in it are more numerous and reveal the distinctiveness of the dialect in a more nuanced way. The lexicon characteristic of Livonian dialect – regional words, ethnographic names, also individual expressions, various phonetic peculiarities (loss of sounds, insertions, rearrangements, etc.) and word forms different from the literary language (use of the masculine gender instead of the feminine gender, verb form invariance regardless of person and number, etc.) – is used in modern Latvian children’s poetry most often. In the poems by Auziņš and Auseklis, the use of dialect is dominated by a respectful attitude. Humour in the analyzed texts does not mock the dialect or its speakers, the analyzed texts demonstrate the recognition that the regional language can be perceived as an important part of the national language, not as its opposition. The study shows that the use of the regional language in modern Latvian children's books simultaneously preserves the peculiarities of the dialect and gives them a new life because the unusual expressiveness makes them attractive to the reader and can promote the use of the dialect. Also, the texts written in such idioms can become an important source for the research of linguists, literature and culture scholars, and educational scientists.