On Russian-Ukrainian languages interaction in Amur dialects

The article deals with the interaction of the Russian and the Ukrainian languages in the dialects of Amur Region, which was settled by inhabitants from the European part of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia in late 19th -early 20th centuries. According to the old residents of Oktyabrskiy District Russian and Ukrainian people live in these villages. Most of the population are Ukrainians, or ''khokhly'' as they call themselves. They realize their language identity and oppose their own language to Ukrainian and Russian. But this phenomenon is typical for old generation born in 1920s-1930s, mainly descendants of immigrants. Earlier the author described the speech portraits of Amur dialect speakers. The aim of this article is to identify the origin of language features and to define the language basis of dialects of Oktyabrskiy District villages. The author pays attention to different language levels of the dialects. At the phonetic level the following phenomena are considered: distinguishing of phonemes /a/ and /o/ in unstressed position; the use of voiced velar fricative "г", vowel "и" instead of the etymological "i"; absence of transition of [е] into ['о]; realization of the phoneme /в/ in the sounds [в], [у], [ув] and [у]; the dominance of hard consonants before front vowels; no devoicing of voiced consonants. At the morphological level the following phenomena are examined: the use of contracted forms of adjectives, ordinal numerals, pronouns, the ending -ив (-ыв) in the form of the genitive case of plural nouns, the ending [т'] of verbs in the form of the third person, prepositions "з", "до", the separation conjunction "чи", the verb быть (be) in the past tense has the form був, быу, була, було, були, singular verbs of the third person may end in vowel -э (-е). Ukrainian lexicon is saved and used in everyday communication and folklore. Our analysis suggests that the considered features coincide with the phonetic, morphological and lexical peculiarities of the Ukrainian language and its dialects. Among them there are those, which coincide with the dialectal features of Russian dialects. However, these features are not included in the system of a distinct group of dialects or a certain dialect of Russia. In the system they are presented only in the Ukrainian language and its dialects. It suggests that the dialects of the examined villages are Ukrainian by origin. It is also confirmed by extralinguistic factors: informants' or their parents' place of birth (Ukraine), the national identity of informants (khokhol), the use of linguistic consciousness.

Keywords

Authors

References