On Phenomena of Vowel Omission in Northern Dialects of Udmurt Language

Abstract

The question of vowel omission in the structure of the word in the subdialects of the Northern dialect of the Udmurt language is considered. The empirical base of the research is the language materials of the author’s dialectological expeditions to the areas of Northern Udmurts. The relevance of the study is determined by the importance of information about the originality of the Udmurt dialects, common in the Northern language area and having insufficient coverage in the scientific literature. Particular attention is paid to the features that on the one hand are peculiar to certain North Udmurt dialects, and / or have limited distribution in the group of subdialects of the studied dialects on the other hand. Typical phenomena of omission of vowels in anlaut, inlaut and auslaut of a word are investigated. It is found that omission of vowels in the absolute beginning of the word in the Northern dialects is slightly represented. The most typical for Northern Udmurt dialects is the loss of vowels in the middle and absolute end of a word. It is stated that this process in inlaut and auslaut is most often exposed to the vowel ы . The territorial prevalence of dialect modifications of vowel omission process in the structure of a word is also revealed. Consistent comparison of the language facts of Northern Udmurt dialects with similar phenomena in other dialects of Udmurt is made. These data show that the contractile trend is typical more to the Northern dialects of the Udmurt language than to the southern dialects.

Keywords

• udmurt language
• dialect phonetics
• northern dialects
• phonetic syntagmatics
• vocalism
• dialect modification
• syncope
• apocope