Dialect "Dictionary of Childhood": in search of a lexicographical format (a case study of the Middle Ob dialects)

Modern humanitarian studies more and more actively refer to the childhood phenomenon, which is the reaction to the current questions about the unique character of human life, about childhood as the period when this uniqueness is being founded. A dictionary is one of the forms of universal representation of human knowledge fragments. Several Russian scholars and research teams made research in the "children's" area in dictionary forms. The appearance of multiple versions of "dictionaries of childhood" at once proves how topical this question is. The Monumental work Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar' russkogo detstva [Encyclopedic Dictionary of Russian Childhood] introduces the experience of systematization of empirical data about a variety of sociocultural phenomena, which all together represent the "world of Russian childhood" in its historical development. The work of the Russian Museum of Ethnography Russkie deti: Osnovy narodnoy pedagogiki [Russian Children: The Basics of Folk Pedagogy] describes the educational system in Russian traditional society (19th - first quarter of the 20th centuries), rites, folk and religious feasts, children's folklore. One of the most large-scale projects being implemented in the recent decades is a fundamental work called Slavyanskie drevnosti [Slavic Antiquities] that aimed to identify the main valuable elements of culture since it was designed. The impressive glossary of the dictionary also covers the "children's" theme. The need of using dialect material as the source of lexicographical practice describing the world of childhood is determined by the idea that a dialect is not only a linguistic and geographical phenomenon but also ethnographic and culturological; this is why lexicographers emphasize the importance of using encyclopedic elements when interpreting units of a dictionary compiled on dialect material. The data of Tomsk dialect dictionaries contain a significant number of lexical units referring to the "children's" cultural sphere. They are units which researchers traditionally refer to this cultural layer. These lexemes name the world of subjects surrounding a child, children's games and their attributes, game actions, children regardless their gender or age, children with deviations; they are used when communicating with children only or when reproducing children's speech, when indicating the order of appearing in a family, highlighting the family status of children and their birth out of wedlock. Words relating to the "children's" sphere in the Middle Ob dialects that are represented in Tomsk dialect dictionaries cover almost all subjects outlined in the existing lexicographical sources, they contain diverse ethnographic, culturological, and historical information. Some of them have not been covered in the lexicographical practice yet.

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