OLD BELIEVER’S DIALECT SPEECH (A “MIXED TEXT” PHENOMENON)

The author considers the specific features of Old Believer’s dialect speech. These features result from the synthesis of cultural codes, equivalent for the linguistic personality, — unwritten traditional popular culture and written literary culture of Old Belief. The literary language of mass media also becomes a source of cultural and linguistic influence forming the communicative competence of the speaker’s linguistic personality. The result of the interaction of different linguistic and cultural systems and the transparency of inter-idioms boundaries is a “mixed” type of text combining the elements of various social and functional subsystems, such as different levels dialect elements, heterogeneous lexical, phraseological and grammar means (vernacular language, bookish and obsolete units, units from the religious sphere). The Old Believer’s speech is a particular form of communication. Remaining typically dialect, it is marked with a noticeable influence of literary, including Church Slavonic tradition, and represents a synthesis of religious and everyday culture, of religious and everyday discourse. The literate Old Believer’s dialect speech specific is a good illustration to the aforementioned theses about the inequivalence of oral and unwritten communication, about the considerable impact of literacy on the dialect speakers’ language, about the necessity to distinguish, when studying Russian dialect speech, the peculiarities conditioned by the oral character of communication, on the one hand, and by the belonging of dialect speakers to the unwritten vs. written culture, on the other hand.