Speech Portrait of the Old-timers of the East Slavic Bryansk-Gomel Border (On the 140 Anniversary Since the Birth of P. A. Rastorguyev)

The relevance of this work is due to the lack of linguistic research devoted to the current state of the Bryansk dialects, functioning in the zone, where Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine border. The article considers phonetic, grammatical and lexical-phraseological features of speech of old-timers inhabiting the south-west of the Bryansk region (Novozybkov, villages of the Novozybkovsky urban district and Zlynkovsky district) primarily in comparison with the features noted in the works of the doctor of philological sciences, professor, full member of the Institute of Belarusian Culture (later – the Belarusian Academy of Sciences) Pavel Andreevich Rastorguev (1881–1959).

The collective speech portrait of elderly villagers, represented by their idiolects, is made up, on the one hand, of dialectal peculiarities, on the other hand, of phenomena that correspond to the norms of the modern Russian literary language.

Particular dialectal speech features are determined by special geographical position of the southwestern regions of the Bryansk region in the past and the territorial proximity of Belarus and Ukraine (Belarusian and Ukrainian languages ​​and dialects).

These features constitute the archaic layer of the Bryansk dialects, since in the speech of the young rural population living in the city, people from villages, urban residents, as a rule, these features are manifested to a lesser extent or are completely absent. The speech portrait of the old-timers of the Bryansk-Gomel borderland forms an idea about the modern features of the border East Slavic Russian-Belarusian dialect.