Published in: Sándor Maticsák, Gábor Zaicz & Tuomo Lahdelma (eds.): Ünnepi könyv Keresztes László tiszteletére. Folia Uralica Debreceniensia 8. Debrecen - Jyväskylä, 2001. 315- 324. Two comments (as of 2015): 1. My sincere apologies for erroneously using the male pronoun when referring to Ingvild Broch! 2. This paper has been briefly referred to by Dieter Stern (Pidgin-Russisch oder gebrochenes Russisch? Slavistische Beiträge zum XIV. Internationalen Slavistenkongress in Skopje-Ohrid, 2008), with the equally brief comment that my explanation “does not really convince” him (“will nicht recht überzeugen”). Sadly enough, Stern does not give any further explanations. Johanna Laakso (Vienna) REFLECTIONS ON THE VERB SUFFIX -OM IN RUSSENORSK AND SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON “DOCKING” IN LANGUAGE CONTACT The roots of Russenorsk Russenorsk was a trade jargon or (pre-)pidgin spoken on the Arctic coasts from the late 18th century on, until finally the October Revolution in Russia put an end to Russo- Norwegian trade contacts. As the name indicates, the language was most typically used between Norwegians and Russians and consisted mostly of Norwegian and Russian elements. However, there are also items of other origin (e.g. grot ‘big; much, very’ from Low German or Dutch, slipom ‘sleep’ from English), and it is probable (cf. Jahr 1996: 117) that the Finns and Sámis in that area used Russenorsk in their dealings with Russians. Although Russenorsk has by now been extensively investigated (Broch & Jahr 1984 [1981], henceforth BJ, and several smaller papers, e.g. Lunden 1978, Jahr 1996, Birzer 1999, Kortlandt 2001), it seems that a more systematic study of its roots from a Finno- Ugristic point of view has not so far been taken. True, some remarks have been made on Sámi vocabulary in Russenorsk, and the noun suffix -a (as in fiska ‘fish’ < Norw. fisk) has been compared with the Sámi strategy of adapting monosyllabic Scandinavian loanwords to the model of inherited disyllabic a-stem nouns (e.g. biila ‘car’ <