Regional Varieties of the Russian Speech

The main types of speech of modern village residents and small towns dwellers, according to the authors, are regiolects and locally colored versions of the literary language. Regionally colored versions lack grammatical dialect phenomena, but there may be some phonetic features that do not interfere with communication as well as regional words. Regiolect, in turn, includes dialectal features of all language levels. The article substantiates the need to distinguish between these types of speech, and also considers regionalisms — words and expressions that are used in a certain territory by the majority of residents regardless of their social status (for example, in the South-West of Russia: aγrest ‘gooseberry’ (also in the Belorussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish), porečka ‘red currant’ (also in Ukrainian, parečka — in Belorussian), burak ‘dutch oven, round oven’ ‘chimney’, holodnik ‘cold beet soup’, ‘beetroot soup’, haladnik — in Belorussian).