DIALECT WORDS IN HISTORICAL DYNAMICS

The article examines dialectal archaisms — words that initially evolved from common Russian words into geographically restricted ones, and then, at a certain historical stage, fell out of active use, primarily in secondary dialects. The formation of dialectal archaisms is traced:
(1) prospectively — beginning with the recording in regional written records of those common Russian words that subsequently became dialectal;
(2) retrospectively — based on the functioning of words represented in written records created in a given territory in modern secondary dialects of the Russian language.
The research methodology is based on a lexicographic analysis of (a) historical dictionaries of the Russian language from the 11th–17th and 18th centuries to establish the pan-Russian distribution of the lexemes under study and their historical trends during this period; (b) modern regional dictionaries, including dialect vocabulary of the region where the written texts with the highlighted lexical units were compiled. 
The study identified four categories of dialect words, demonstrating the diverse paths of their historical dynamics. These are (1) dialect words that have retained their common usage in these dialects; (2) dialect words that form the passive vocabulary of the dialects; (3) dialect words that have undergone transformations in terms of expression — a kind of lexical, phonetic, and morphological archaisms; (4) dialect archaisms — words that, having transitioned from the category of general Russian words to regionalisms, were lost at some point in history in the secondary dialects studied. The exceptional diversity of the historical destinies of dialect words confirms the idea that the evolution of a dialect language must be considered not only in terms of extralinguistic factors, but also internal, strictly linguistic ones. In this light, the developed method for identifying dialectal archaisms more deeply reveals the traces of this complex influence on the historical dynamics of dialect words.