Exotic Kinship Vocabulary (Based on the Arkhangelsk Dialects)

A comparison of Old Russian sources with the present-day inventory of kinship terms shows that a number of lexical items have been lost, and their decline continues. With the transition from the “extended” family to the “nuclear” family, many terms began to be confused or forgotten, especially those referring to relations by marriage (affinal kinship). Today, few urban speakers, particularly among the younger generation, can identify words such as zolovka, svojačenica, šurin, or dever'; confusion often arises even with tyošča (‘mother-in-law’) and svekrov' (‘mother-in-law’). There is a strong tendency to replace single-word kinship terms with descriptive phrases. At the same time, evidence from regional dialects reveals that the kinship lexicon is much richer than what is preserved in Old Russian monuments. This article presents kinship terms that are unusual or unexpected for speakers of the standard language, recorded in Arkhangelsk dialects during the compilation of the Arkhangelsk Regional Dictionary. Some have transparent inner form, while in others the original motivation is obscured. In certain cases, northern dialects even preserve lexemes characteristic of other Slavic areas. These “exotic” kinship terms are examined in their morphological, grammatical, lexical, and semantic aspects.

kinship terminology, family, affinal relations, Arkhangelsk dialects, northern Russian dialects, Russian dialectology