Influence of the 17th century Karelian settlers’ language on the Novgorod region's toponymy

The first part of the article briefly examines the history of the Karelian population russification within the Novgorod region. The second, larger and more informative, part of the article explores how the Karelian language component has been reflected in Novgorod onomastics, especially in its toponymy. Today, Karelian geographical names can only be found in those parts of the Novgorod region, where the Karelians have existed as a separate ethnic group in the 20th century (the suburbs of such localities as Valdai, Borovichi, Okulovka, Lyubytino, Demansk, Krestcy, and some villages along the middle flow of the Msta River). In such places, there are also folk legends about the Karelians’ arrival and some reminiscences of their lives. Such ethnonyms as Karel, Korel or Korelyak are often used as collective nicknames of a certain village inhabitants and sometimes become the denominations of people who talk unclearly or with some dialectal peculiarities. The Karelians who have settled among the Russian population of the Novgorod Land usually borrowed Russian toponyms in their finished form, so, very few names of Novgorod villages have Karelian origins. The article offers a detailed analysis of the presumably or evidently Karelian village names: Костково ( function show_eabstract() { $('#eabstract1').hide(); $('#eabstract2').show(); $('#eabstract_expand').hide(); }