Northern Russian wedding vocabulary: etymological and ethnolinguistic notes

The article considers some lexical units of northern Russian wedding ceremonies, recorded by Ural University Toponymie Expedition to the Vologda and Kostroma regions - i. e. Kostroma word tozminy, used as the name of one of the wedding feasts (and figuratively meaning social gatherings with feasts during other family ceremonies), as well as Vologda words chikali and sorokachi, Vologda and Kostroma word sychi, and Kostroma words sukhontsy,galki and galchata, used as the names of uninvited guests who appeared at the wedding feast on their own will, without an invitation from the hosts. In the article these words are put in the broad context of dialect wedding vocabulary, vocabulary of folk celebrations and visitations, as well as non-verbal components of traditional wedding and hospitality culture. Based on these data and taking into account linguistic and phonetic characteristics, the author offers etymological interpretations for “dark” words or corrects solutions previously offered in academic literature. Presented linguistic commentary deepens the reading of the entire wedding ceremony “text”: clarifying the internal form of the analyzed words restores the original role-playing frames, within which uninvited, but still expected guests are allowed to behave; as well as reconstructs the connections of certain northern Russian lexemes with symbolic wedding codes, thoroughly elaborated in the Slavic folk culture.