East Slavic Contact Interaction in Primorsky Krai (According to the Linguistic Expedition of 2023)

Abstract

The paper presents the first results of the field research carried out in June 2023 in the Khorol and Chernigov districts of Primorsky Krai of Russia among the descendants of immigrants from Ukrainian and Belarusian lands. The purpose of the expedition survey was to record the speech of dialect speakers of the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, to study the functioning of dialects in contact with closely related Russian language, to identify the preservation of traditional folk culture. The main problem during field research was related to the difficulties of informants when trying to record spontaneous dialect speech. Relics of Belarusian dialects were not found in this expedition. The utterances in Ukrainian were recorded in cases of quoting speech of older relatives, in memories about childhood and in folklore. The paper presents some transcribed texts, reveals phonetic and morphological features, analyzes individual lexical units. Narratives on the following topics are presented: the linguistic situation among migrants at the micro and macro levels, metalanguage observations, stories about local place names and ethnic nicknames. In addition to audio recordings, a written source is analyzed, the history of the formation of the Khorol village, written in Russian with Ukrainian dialect items. This text reveals all the linguistic features noted in the oral speech of the informants. Moreover, it contains valuable information about the daily activities of the first settlers, about their holidays, customs, contacts with neighbors of different ethnicity. In the future, it is planned to work on transcribing the entire corpus of recorded texts for their publication and analysis, as well as to publish a written history of the village of Khorol.

Keywords

• dialect
• primorsky krai
• field research
• narrative
• russian language
• ukrainian language
• belarusian language