How the Dialect Affiliation of the Selkup Dialect of Ivankino Village, Kolpashevo District, Changed in the 20th Century

The article aims to analyse the text of the book Conversations About the True God and True Faith in the Dialect of the Ob Ostyaks (1900) by St. Macarius (Nevsky). S.V. Kovylin found information about the native speakers St. Macarius had worked with. They were Roman S. Tobol’zhin and Nikifor M. Tobol’zhin. Roman Tobol’zhin was born in the Igotkino village, located 12 km away from Ivankino, and moved to Ivankino in 1917. Thus, this book is the earliest text created in the Middle Ob dialect. The author analysed the text of the book by 11 dialect-classifying features and compared it with archival data recorded by A.I. Kuzmina, A.P. Dulzon and his students collected in the second half of the 20th century. Kovylin created a glossed corpus of St. Macarius’s book and its concordance. The comprehensive analysis by 11 dialect features of the concordance, A.I. Kuzmina’s dictionary, and archival data on the Ivankino dialect, collected by Dulzon and his students and published by V.V. Bykonya, showed that, in 1900, the Ivankino dialect had three southern innovative isoglosses: protoSelkup *-ц- > 0, proto-Selkup *s > s, proto-Selkup *-l' > -j. The dialect of St. Macarius’s book has no Central Selkup innovative dialect features. Therefore, we can assume that the Ivankino dialect belonged to the southern group of Selkup dialects in the 19th century. According to Dulzon’s archives, in the second half of the 20th century, the Ivankino dialect had a number of features of a central dialect: the change s (< *s) > s was actually completed; the changes -m > -p, -n > -t, -ц > -k, 0 (< *ц) > y, -j (< *-l') > -l began. So, the Ivankino dialect of the beginning of the second half of the 20th century can already be classified as central. As the analysis shows, the dialect’s change from southern to central under the influence of the neighbouring dialects was almost completed in the second half of the 20th century. The change took about 70 years, and only the analysis of the data from St. Macarius’s book allows clarifying that, in the 19th century, the Ivankino village spoke a southern Selkup dialect.

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