ABOUT THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLD BELIEVERS IN THE NEVEL DISTRICT OF THE PSKOV REGION

There are no Old Believers left in the southwestern part of the Nevelsky district now, but some traces of their stay here for two centuries can be found. The ethnonyms “Moskali” and “Skobari” to denote the Old Believers are still used in the language of the older generation of local inhabitants. The Old Believers are often called a “special nation”, which implies, first of all, confessional differences. Most of the locals did not notice any peculiarities in the language of the Old Believers, although some informants say that their language was “more clean”, so it was more approximate to the standard language. It is known that the Old Believers who lived in the southern part of the Pskov region in the XVII–XIX centuries came from more northern regions (they spoke Middle-Pskov or Novgorod dialects). Unlike the Old Believers who lived in a foreign-speaking environment (in the border regions of Lithuania and Latvia), the Nevel Old Believers, apparently, almost completely assimilated linguistically, retaining only some of their original features. The article analyzes the idiolect of a native of a former Old Believer village, which reveals some features that distinguish it from the dialect of other informants. These features indicate incomplete assimilation with the surrounding dialects. These are the absence of the Belarusian reflection of proto-Slavic “jers” before [j], the absence of the initial [j] in the forms of 3rd person pronouns, the absence of the prosthetic [v] before the vowels [o], [u] at the beginning of the word, the absence of the Belarusian form of the 3rd person verb “to be” [jos’t’]. In addition, syncretic system of endings Gen.-Dat.-Loc. Sg. nouns of a-declension and the ending Gen. Sg. adjectival declination with a labial consonant (-ovo).