Notes on the dialects of the Crimean Mennonite settlements (based on the V. M. Zhirmunsky's archives)

Mennonite Germans were among the many ethnic groups that inhabited the Crimean peninsula since the end of the 18th century until the 1940s. A special way of life, faith and language significantly distinguished them from other German immigrants. The dialect spoken by the Mennonites and called Plautdietsch (Plotditch) is a type of Low German, close to Low Prussian. During this period, two dialects were formed, which are still preserved in Mennonites communities in Siberia, in the Altai region, etc. - the dialects of Khortitsa and of Molotchna. The dialect contamination took place in new, mixed settlements, in the so-called daughter colonies. The major contribution towards studying the folklore and the language of the German colonies of the Southern regions of the USSR was made in 1920s by V. M. Zhirmunsky, a major Russian scholar, philologist, Germanist, folklorist, along with his students and assistants. The collection of the material and its linguistic description were stopped in the 1930s due to repressions against Russian Germans, as well as the researchers of their culture. The collected data were preserved in Zhirmunsky’s archive in the Sciences Academy Archive in Saint-Petersburg. The linguistic processing of these data is today an important task of Germanistics. The aforementioned archive, which is of great academic value, offers rich data on dialectology, as well as language variation and change, and will allow scholars to understand synchronic and diachronic processes in the corresponding dialects. Of particular interest are the dialectological questionnaires in Zhirmunsky’s archive, some of which were completed in the Mennonite language (dialect) Plautdietsch. Our study deals with linguistic analysis of such questionnaires. Special attention is paid by us to several phonological phenomena in Plautdietsch: palatal consonants, palatalization of long /u:/, the development of /a/ in closed syllable. The processing of the questionnaire data provides a basis for their possible comparison with the current state of affairs in the modern language, primarily in the Siberian Plautdietsch.