Who is dedinka?

The article is based on materials of the “Arkhangelsk Regional Dictionary” and its rich card index. It is part of a large issue on the study of kinship terms in Arkhangelsk dialects. It is dedicated to one of the terms of family relationships: the nomination of uncle’s wife. In the modern literary language there are no special terms that indicate this element in terms of kinship, but they are found in the Old Russian language and they are still quite popular in many dialects of the Russian North. In Arkhangelsk dialects, there are more than 30 lexemes with this meaning, derived from the nomination uncle, and bearing etiological connections with the root d’ad- (*děd-). The differences between these words lie in the phonetic and word-formative language levels. The semantic aspect is also of great interest.

The “large circle” of the concept of “uncle’s wife” nomination includes not only special terms, but also terms of consanguinity (mother, grandmother, aunt), properties (daughter-in-law) and spiritual kinship resulting from the baptism of a baby (bozhatka).

Semantic shifts are bidirectional, and the intersection of terms within each group is shown. Special terms, whose main purpose is the nomination of uncle’s wife, turn out to be ambiguous.

They are used to refer to other relatives, such as the wife of the brother-in-law, the wife of the husband’s, the wife of the wife’s uncle; the wife a sibling, a sister-in-law or any distant non-blood relative. The naming usually goes either “by children” or “by husband.”