“And Gorkushas, and Kardyks, and Tsokalas, and Syusyukalas” in the Descriptions of Dialectologists of the 19th Century

The article analyzes the names of dialect phonetic phenomena used in the works of scientists in the 19th century. They most clearly reflect the thorny path of the emergence of dialectology as a science in this period. We will follow the development of this group of vocabulary from the first examples that remained outside the framework of professional scientific discourse to large generalizing projects for the description of Russian dialects, which were undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century. During this time, the most active processes related to the formation of terms, competition of synonyms, their stylistic distribution and the elimination of unnecessary means occurred. We pay attention to the methods of designating the phonetic features of the dialect, since this vocabulary formed the basis for the description of the dialect continuum. Many folklorists, historians, ethnographers, publicists and linguists themselves proposed their own versions of dialect classification in the second half of the 19th century. In the article, we show that the designations of interest to us were drawn by dialectology directly from folk speech and until the beginning of the 20th century retained a connection with the original environment of use. They often contained an assessment of dialectal speech as illiterate and corrupted, and included vocabulary from the area of speech defects.