Informal toponymy of Russian North (Karelia and Leningrad region) in electronic recourses

Based on the study of the Internet resources and fiction, materials for a dictionary of contemporary informal toponyms of Russia and neighboring countries are presented. The main models of their formation were revealed with the help of the obtained corpus of toponyms. According to these models, some variants were experimentally constructed from other place names. For example, one of the most popular model is a stem reduction in a toponym and affixation with the suffix -ik (f. e. Petrik ‘Petrozavodsk’). According to this model, variant Svetik was constructed for Svetogorsk; the usage of this word was verified by the Internet sources, hence the word was included into the dictionary. The article provides some examples of informal names of places found in two regions of the Russian North: the Republic of Karelia and Leningrad region. Some of them are almost formal (f. e. Medgora ‘Medvezhyegorsk’), some are colloquial (historical, such as Rambov ‘Lomonosov, former Oranienbaum’ and recent, such as Petrik ‘Petrozavodsk’), some are pejorative (f. e. Medvezhyedyrsk ‘Medvezhyegorsk’, motivated by Russian word ‘dyra ’, which in Russian has a figurative meaning ‘backwoods’). Informal toponyms constitute a particular group. They are formed by the replacement or contamination with other toponym, usually foreign (f. e. Kondopengagen ‘Kondopoga’