From Expedition Records in the Village of Yudino, Voronezh Region: Interaction of the Local Vernacular Ukrainian with the Russian Language

The article is based on the material recorded by the authors during an expedition in 2024 to the village of Yudino, Podgorensky district, Voronezh oblast, whose dialect can be localised as Ukrainian. The analysis of the audio transcripts of three villagers (the main informants were two women born in 1935 and 1937) allowed us to identify the main features characteristic of the original vernacular, as well as to examine some of the results of the interaction between the vernacular and Russian, which is the only official language in the area where the vernacular exists: the mass media (television, radio) and school education are in Russian.

The main phonetic features: [i] in place of *м under accent and without accent (but in loanwords [e]: mel), in place of *e in the new closed syllable; in unaccented syllables the reflexes of *y, *i and *e coincide in the sound [y], but in the final open syllable the reflexes of these vowels differ; there is a distinction of /o/ and /a/ in unaccented syllables, except for borrowings from Russian; labial consonants are softened only before [i]; the phoneme /v/ is represented by a bilabial sound, but in some cases before [s] — by a unvoiced fricative [f]; the phoneme /g/ is represented by a pharyngeal voiced sound [h], except for single borrowings, where [g] is used.

Grammatical peculiarities: short forms of adjectives; ending -oho in the genitive case of masculine and neuter adjectives and pronouns, etc.

Along with well-preserved native vocabulary, there is a large number of various borrowings from the Russian language.