Slavonic Loanwords in the Dialect of Gammalsvenskby

Svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv. 2018. P. 29–74.

Mankov A.

The purpose of this article is to introduce new material on Slavonic loanwords in the dialect of
Gammalsvenskby, the only surviving Scandinavian dialect in the territory of the former Soviet
Union. The data on the present-day dialect presented here was obtained during fieldwork in the
village carried out by the author in 2004–13. The article provides a corpus of Russian and
Ukrainian loanwords that occurred in the interviews, together with examples of usage and
parallels from earlier studies. It also contains an overview of the phonetics, morphology and
semantic domains of the loanwords. This article deals almost exclusively with items that have
undergone assimilation in the dialect. The degree and character of this assimilation vary significantly; the article studies specific processes by which it manifests itself. The great majority
of the Slavonic loanwords are nouns. The overall number of nouns occurring in the interviews
is approx. 1,000, of which around 100 non-compounds are of Russian or Ukrainian origin. Criteria for regarding a loanword as Russian or Ukrainian are also presented. These are phonetic
and lexical features that differentiate Russian from Ukrainian.

Keywords: endangered languages, Gammalsvenskby