Belarusian and Ukrainian Elements in South-Western Russian Dialects (Brjansk Region)

The geo-dialectal area examined in this study is located in the western and southwestern parts of the present-day Brjansk Region of the Russian Federation. In contemporary Russian dialectology, this territory is classified as belonging to the western group (also referred to as the southwestern zone) of the broader southern Russian dialectal area. As noted in several studies on the Ukrainian–Belarusian border dialects, the Brjansk dialects share a number of cross-dialectal features with both the Belarusian and Ukrainian dialectal areas. These dialects therefore merit particular attention and may warrant future reclassification, at least with regard to oral texts recorded in the twentieth century. At the present stage of research, the study aims to identify and analyze salient Belarusian features and, to a lesser extent, Ukrainian features that characterized the dialects of the Brjansk Region until the late 1980s. The analysis focuses primarily on phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena.