PHONOLOGICAL PHENOMENA OF CONTACT ORIGIN IN THE RUSSIAN ONEGO DIALECTS

The article describes the conditions of liapanje — the shift of stress from the fi nal syllable of a phonetic word to the initial one in the Russian Onego dialects (Medvezhegorsky district of Karelia), which, according to the general opinion, is the result of contacts with the Baltic-Finnish languages and, first of all, with Ludic dialects of Karelian language. Liapanje in Russian Onego dialects may be the result of assimilation of the Karelian pattern of word prosody with a fixed stress on the initial syllable and secondary stress on each odd syllable, except the last one; at the same time, it has internal prerequisites. A direct analogue of the accentual system with liapanje in the Onego dialects is the Proto-Slavic accentual system with its opposition of orthotonic wordforms and enclinomena and the phenomena of vocalism connected with this opposition. It is shown that mora as a unit of the word prosody of the Baltic-Finnish languages, becomes an element of phrasal prosody when borrowed into the Onego dialects. The optional use of liapanje, its sociolinguistic status and examples of “code switching” are also described.