Grammatical Interference in Late Seventeenth-Century Multilingual Language Description: A Contrastive Analysis of Russian, Latin, and German in the Dialogue Texts of Grammatica Russica (1696)

This study analyzes grammatical interference in the dialogue texts of Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf’s Grammatica Russica (1696), a trilingual text presenting Russian alongside Latin and German. Examining twenty-five examples across three grammatical domains — prepositions and case forms, negation and interrogative constructions, and personal pronouns — the analysis identifies the types, sources, and mechanisms of interference. Interference manifests as transfer, overgeneralization, and avoidance. Transfer and avoidance prove to be two sides of a single mechanism: where the reference languages possess corresponding structures, those structures are imported into Russian; where no correspondence exists, Russian-specific rules are suppressed. Exploiting the trilingual parallel structure, the study classifies interference sources into German-only (Type A), Latin-only (Type B), and joint interference (Type C), revealing that German operates predominantly at the lexico-grammatical level and Latin at the morphosyntactic level. Certain prepositional usages also suggest possible interference from other Slavic languages, highlighting the limits of a purely text-internal approach. The analysis further distinguishes interference from authentic traces of seventeenth-century spoken Russian and identifies strategic language use in Ludolf’s context-sensitive handling of second-person pronouns. By identifying the strata of interference, this study provides a foundation for distinguishing portions of the text that reliably reflect late seventeenth-century spoken Russian from those shaped by the author’s multilingual background.