Metric books of Siberian Tatars “on the record of marriages and divorces” as a historical and linguistic source

Muslim (mosque) metric books are a unique monument of writing characterized by specific features of official civil registration. The manuscripts under consideration were written by imams in Arabic script in the Old Tatar language. The transliteration, translation into Russian, and analysis of manuscript texts from historical and linguistic perspectives allowed both sociohistorical and linguistic factors to be considered. This research focuses on the lexical features found within marriage and divorce records of the Turkic-speaking population from Tobolsk Uyezd, Tobolsk Province, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The findings of the linguistic analysis are as follows: the books contain one-member, two-member, and three-member anthroponyms; some settlements could have two names, but preference was given to the oikonym used among the local Turkic-speaking population; the names of provinces, uyezds (districts), volosts retained the root characteristic of the Russian language. A wide range of themes is represented in the appellative lexicon, including kinship terms, place names, ecclesiastical titles, time designations, monetary denominations, tools, apparel, household goods, and animals. Attention is also paid to officialese, along with its various forms, focusing on its role as a defining stylistic element within the genre of official business writing, namely metric records. Concurrently, the texts reveal the presence of regional speech patterns, notably those representative of the Tobol-Irtysh dialect.

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