Reflection of features of colloquial speech in the shvank of Russian Germans

One of the forms of preservation of the native language and culture of Russian Germans are works of folk art. Significant among the extant folk materials are shvanks of Russian Germans, which in the processed state were published by Russian-German writers. By the shvank German and Russian researchers mean a satirical story having a small volume. A characteristic feature of the shvank is its attribution to a "people" story with all its stylistic and structural features. German writers in Russia who are well familiar with the folk art and the language of their people seek to pass the national language in the processing of folk shvanks. The majority of authors who published shvanks, or their ancestors, were born and lived in the Volga region. They are fluent in the Volga German dialects spoken by the characters from their shvanks. Shvanks transmit dialectal speech, replete with phonetic phenomena characteristic of spoken language. The main phonetic markers of conversational speech are assimilation, reduction and elision of reservation. At the same time, the graphical features of the transfer of spoken language in shvanks of Russian Germans reflect dialectal and phonetic features which allow identifying common features of German dialects of the Volga region, formed as a result of a long mixture. Their characteristic preserved the most common signs of West-Middle-German dialects with the Hessian base. Dialectal morphological and syntactic features of Russian Germans' shvanks convey the specifics of dialectal speech. First of all, they are manifested in the peculiarities of the realization of grammatical categories of nouns, adjectives, verbs and pronouns. Shvanks present conversational features of the modern German language and preserve the dialect form of earlier historical stages of development. To a lesser extent shvanks reflect dialect syntax; it basically retains a colloquial character. Along with dialect phonetics and grammar, shvanks present dialect vocabulary. Analysis of the texts showed that this dialect has preserved mostly West-Middle-German features. The vocabulary of this dialect has preserved a considerable number of Middle-German, Hessian variants of German words. Published shvanks reflect typical conversational and dialectal peculiarities of the language of Russian Germans at all linguistic levels: phonetic, grammatical and lexical. These features are due to the oral nature of the existence of the national language, the isolation from the original language of the team and the long period of interaction with dialects of the Russian language, which led to the alignment of dialectal systems, the preservation of old forms, to a large number of borrowings from Russian.

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