Northern Russian Dialects

The northern Russian dialects make up one of the main groups of the Russian dialects.

Territory

* The territory of the ''primary formation'' (e.g. that consist of "Old" Russia of the 16th century before Eastern conquests by Ivan IV) is fully or partially modern regions (''oblasts''): Vologda, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Novgorod, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Arkhangelsk.
* The territory of the ''second formation'' (e.g. where Russians settled after the 16th century) consist of most of the land to the North and North-East of Central Russia, that is Karelia, Murmansk, Vyatka, Perm, Komi, Udmurtia, and as well as Siberia and Far East.

List of sub-dialects

* Pomor dialects
* Olonets group
* Novgorod group
* Vologda- Kirov group
* Vladimir-Volga group

Phonology

* Lack of vowel reduction: unstressed does not merge with (okanye). Unstressed , and after soft consonants also do not typically merge.
* Some dialects have high or diphthongal (in the Novgorod subgroup even ) as a reflex of .
* In the eastern part of the group the change of every to before hard ( unpalatalized) consonants occurs (in Standard Russian only in stressed syllables). also changes to in these positions but only in stressed syllables.
* Also in the eastern part of the dialect group there is in certain positions instead of Standard Russian .
* Tsokanye: the merger of Standard Russian and into one consonant whether , or (like in Pskov and Ryazan Southern Russian dialects).
* In the Vologda region, final hard is replaced by a semivowel .
* , , are like in Standard Russian (differs from Southern Russian). Nevertheless, in some sub-dialects , can also be replaced with semivowel like in Southern Russian.
* In some dialects traces of unreduced , which normally reduced to in all of East Slavic: "the sound between Lake Pskov and Lake Chud" (instead of expected ), from earlier "reread (past tense)" (instead of standard ). In these examples the groups *''tl, dl'' dissimilated to , instead of reducing to . Some ( Shakhmatov, Durnovo) see this as an indication of possible West Slavic admixture in those areas, while others ( Trubetzkoy, Lehr-Spławiński) treat it as an archaism from Proto-Slavic times.

Morphology

* A suffixed definite article ''-to, -ta, -te'' similarly existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian.
* 3rd person verbal ending with non-palatalized ''-t'' as in Standard Russian.

Vocabulary

Northern dialects are characterized by a number of words like, ('log hut'), , ('winter crop'), ('to bark'), , ('to plough'), ('rye'), ('gathering'), ('very much'), ('beautiful') and others. They also have about 200 words of Uralic origin.

Notes

References

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External links

* Michael Daniel, Nina Dobrushina, Ruprecht von Waldenfels
The language of the Ustja river basin. A corpus of North Russian dialectal speech
2013–2018. Bern, Moscow.

See also

* Central Russian dialects
* Southern Russian dialects
* Old Novgorod dialect
* Boris Shergin – a writer of the Pomor dialect
* Vowel reduction in Russian

Russian dialects

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