Dialect names of holidays and rituals as a reflection of the cultural and historical traditions of the Russian people

The article studies lexical and phraseological units nominating holidays and ceremonies in Russian dialects, which are spoken on the territory of the Republic of Mordovia. The specificity of nominative processes associated with the naming of a fact that is significant from linguistic and cultural point of view, is determined. The research is carried out on the material taken from the Dictionary of Russian dialects on the territory of the Republic of Mordovia. It has been found that in Russian dialects, the names of religious holidays, which are dedicated to the most revered saints, or the holidays related to a certain time of the year, are actively used. The surviving holidays reproduce elements of the most ancient customs associated with the worship of human deities, the cult of vegetation, water and fire, which magical powers were attributed to. The names of rituals represent a special layer in the dialect corpus. The most illustrative represented are the funeral rite and the rite of baptism. All these rituals are of great importance in the life of the people, since they symbolize a change in the status of a person, his transition from one state to another. The nominations of different phases of wedding ceremony are noted to be most numerous, while funeral and baptizing rites are less representative. The study showed that the names of holidays and rituals in Russian folk dialects reflect cultural and historical traditions, beliefs, customs of representatives of a territorially closed society. They perform peculiar means of representing the ethnic and cultural consciousness of the people.