A comparative study of the traditional handicraft (felting) vocabulary in the East Middle Russian dialects and in the Western group of South Russian dialects
This article proposes a tentative description of the specific felting terminology found in Smolensk and Volga regions’ dialects undertaken to confirm/refine the classification principles laid down in our previous works and to measure the similarity between local variants of the folk handicraft nomenclature within the lexical system of Russian folk dialects.
Our research draws on two main sources: our own field records made in the Penza, Ulyanovsk and Smolensk regions in 2013–2018, and a series of the respective local dialect dictionaries. The data collected during our Volga region field trips include 312 lexical items, and the materials obtained in interviews with Smolensk region felters, 201 items. In the course of the interviews, the craftsman would be asked for a detailed account of his craft and skills and posed some additional clarifying questions.
In the material thus obtained, we singled out words and set phrases related to traditional handicraft activities, dividing them into several basic thematic subgroups. In general, there seem to be seven such subgroups, sufficient to describe any handicraft production situation denoting: (1) actors, (2) primary activities, (3) auxiliary activities, (4) products, (5) product parts, (6) materials, and (7) instruments. Their analysis shows that some of these terms tend to be incorporated in the common lexical stock of the region, while others (e.g., words for particular actions/instruments) form closed sets of handicraft jargonisms, never used or even known outside a given professional community. This peculiar observation may hint that there can be some subgroups within the handicraft lexicon to some extent incongruent with the standard distribution of lexical items between the relevant Russian dialects.
Our findings can be summarized as follows: (1) The felting vocabulary features strong territorial variation, with local words representing around 30 % of the stock, while less than 10 % of the words demonstrate stable areal distribution. This shows that a considerable number of handicraft terms belong to the lexical system of a particular dialect rather than to Standard Russian; (2) At the same time, the high ratio of common lexical items in East Middle Russian and South Russian dialects rep resent an all-Russian layer of handicraft terms thus pointing down to a commonality of Russian handicraft traditions.
