The problem of stratigraphy of toponyms of the Middle Volga area

Middle Volga was the toponymic space peculiar with emergence and disappearance of a myriad of toponymes of Finno-Ugric, Iran and even Baltic origin, creating a mosaic of toponymic metamorphosis. Baltic toponymy is found here in fragments, mainly in the form of hydronyms. The presence of Finno-Ugric toponymy layer in the Middle Volga region is far more fre-quent than the Baltic. Even in Mordovia itself one can easily find place names the seman-tics of which is related to the languages of the Volga, Baltic and Finnish peoples. The frequency of the Finno-Ugric place names within the region under consideration decreases from north-east to south-west. Predominance of place names of the Finno-Ugric origin is typical for Nizhny Novgorod, Penza, Ulyanovsk region, while the Samara region was set-tled by Moksha and Erzyan people relatively recently, in XI-XIIIth centuries. Trans-Volga region was populated by these peoples only in the XVIIth century. Toponymes of Iranian origin in the Middle Volga region are especially interesting since they remain deficiently unexplored. Compared with Baltic, Finno-Ugric and Iranian layers Slavic place names quantitatively prevail almost everywhere (the exception is Tatarstan). Array of Turkic names is comparable in scale to the Slavic names array, moreover, Turkic place names are fairly stable and are easily identified by their trivial semantics. Turkisms in toponymy of the Middle Volga region have their roots in the remote medieval past of the region and are tied to the placement of the Turkic peoples in its territory. Although over the past few decades the study of Turkic place names in the country receives sig-nificant attention of scientists, it is still poor for regions except Tatarstan or even a major territorial taxa, as is the Middle Volga region.