Romansh Tuatschin acquisition

Romansh Tuatschin is a dialect of Sursilvan spoken by approximately 1500 speakers in the Val Tujetsch and by other speakers living in diaspora. In a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, I helped collect a naturalistic corpus of 6 children growing up speaking Tuatschin in mono and bilingual families. This project allows us to examine acquisition of Tuatschin between the ages of 2 and 4.

One fascinating aspect of the Sursilvan dialects is their transitory state in the diachrony of gender agreement. Like other Romance languages, its parent language was Latin and included three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Like most daughter languages that still exist today, Sursilvan has only two genders for nouns: masculine and feminine. However, in Sutsilvan (including Tuatschin), we find remnants of the third gender in adjectives and participles used in predicative constructions. This has resulted in the use of two paradigms for adjectives and forms that look the same but are used for different purposes in different positions. We examine the acquisition of these paradigms and their position in diachrony in several studies.

For more information on Romansh Tuatschin, you can consult the comprehensive grammar which includes speech examples compiled by Philippe Maurer.