Ivan Durov’s dictionary as a source for studying Russian game vocabulary

The purpose of the article is to show the linguistic value of dialect data presented in a regional ethnographic dictionary for describing the “Game” fi eld. The object of the research is the Dictionary of the Living Pomor Language in its Everyday and Ethnographic Use compiled by Ivan Matveevich Durov. This dictionary has not been used for the linguistic analysis of the dialect lexical system, which constitutes the relevance and novelty of the article. The importance of this research is due to the fact that entries of ethnographic dictionaries include information that is not always taken into account by dialect dictionaries. Thus, Durov’s dictionary becomes an important source for collecting information on the stated topic and its subsequent examination in various linguistic aspects (onomasiological, semantic, ethnolinguistic, and areal ones). From the onomasiological perspective, the studied lexical units are characterized by variability, which is due to the diversity of vernacular names in regional communities, the lack of norms regulating their formation, and the incompleteness of the stage of nomination formation. Semantically, the fi eld under study is divided into fragments, with game names prevailing among them. The game vocabulary includes a special cultural component, which makes it possible to place this group into the ethnolinguistic paradigm. The importance of using Durov’s materials is also conditioned by the fact that the Pomor dialects reveal some features of the ancient Novgorod-Pskov migration. Another interesting category of vocabulary is newly coined words that emerge in a particular dialect system and refl ect the uniqueness and specifi city of the studied fragment of linguistic reality.