Actualization of Mother Tongue in the Speech of a Contemporary Village Inhabitant

Abstract

This article provides grounds for legitimacy of attracting a contemporary village inhabitant in the capacity of an informant. A contemporary villager represents a particular type of a language personality who has a developed metalinguistic consciousness. His speech is characterized by conscious actualization of the mother sub-dialect. The markers of a developed metalinguistic consciousness of an informant are the following ones: estimating characteristics of a sub-dialect, ascertaining as a unifying foundation of the mother tongue which serves as a unifying force in a village group of people; feeling of regret about dialect disunity, awareness of impossibility to reconstruct local sub-dialect in its archaic form, and for this reason, the importance of collecting dialectic linguistic material for the purpose of preserving a dialect as a part of traditional folk culture. The metalinguistic consciousness is also represented by a combination of communication registers in the informant’s speech. The article analyzes sub-dialect words and phraseological units, previously unregistered in dictionaries of Kuban sub-dialects, as well as provides the author’s contexts, where the informant demonstrates functioning of dialectic units of speech.