Portrait of the historical linguistic personality of the inhabitant of the Ural province Ivan Maltsev (based on private letters of the pre-revolutionary period)

This article provides a reconstruction of the historical linguistic personality of the native of the town of Solikamsk Ivan Maltsev on the basis of 16 of his letters to his parents written in 1904-1914. The object under analysis is a representative of not elite but grassroots type of speech culture. The description imple-ments the approach of linguistic personology, which is a young area of study in linguistics. The subject of the research is thematic preferences, especially the style and manner of presentation, the speech competences of the sender reflected in the texts (spelling, punctuation, lexicon, style, grammar, skills of text generation) and external parameters of the letters (such as handwriting, presence or absence of signs of self-revision, pe-culiarities of the layout of the text on the page). This allows us to identify the structural features of the histo-rical linguistic personality: mainly pragmatic orientation of interests and aspirations, stereotyped thinking and moral-ethical life attitudes, a narrow range of interests, lack of intellectual and cultural needs. As a lan-guage personality, I. V. Maltsev was formed in dialectal and colloquial speech environment and finds no de-sire to raise the level of his spoken language competences. The study showed that the sender is a carrier of ordinary language consciousness and traditional culture, which largely determined the character of the Ural region in the pre-revolutionary period. This study continues a series of reconstructions of historical linguistic personalities conceived as a gallery of portraits of representatives of the provincial clergy, merchants, offi-cials. The results of the study contribute to deeper understanding of the language situation and speech culture of the Ural province of pre-revolutionary Russia.