Вопросы ономастики (Jun 2015)
Karelian Heritage in the Toponymy of the Southeastern Lake Onega Area
Abstract
The article focuses on place names of Karelian origin on the territory of Southeastern Lake Onega region and provides linguistic and historical evidence of Karelians’ migrations to the area in question. The etymological analysis of place names made by the author supports that the Karelian language was brought to the territory of the Southeastern Lake Onega region from the Northwestern Lake Ladoga region by the end of the 15th century. The documentary and linguistic data testify that in the 15–18th centuries there were several migrations of Karelians to the studied area and that in the 18th century the Karelian language was still in use by a part of the population of the eastern Andoma river basin. Since Karelians migrated to the Russian-Veps language environment, the article provides evidence of Vepsian adaptations of Karelian place names and of Veps-Karelian and Russian-Karelian bilingualism in the studied area in the 17–18th centuries. The research is based on reliable historical resources and toponymic data from the contemporary Karelian territories and takes into account the geographic characteristics of the named objects.
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