A. A. Shakhmatov’s principles of lexicography as pillars of creating dictionaries for ethnoses without written languages

The author brings up a question of the continuity of lexicographic techniques applied for the description of linguistic units (including superword units) developed by A. A. Shakhmatov. The first and second issues of the second volume of The Dictionary of the Russian Language created under his editorship are the innovative work of the thesaurus type. They demonstrate the productivity of using the principles of anthropocentrism, historicism, systemicity, and communicativity in lexicography when describing linguistic units of the word and superword types. Shakhmatov’s works play an important role in the formation of Russian lexicography and phraseography. Its lexicographic concept acquires particular relevance in the context of extinction of non-written languages under the pressure of digital civilization. Having lost its own language, ethnos, as a rule, loses its identity. This could be the fate of the language of the Nagaybaks, one of the small indigenous peoples of the Southern Urals. To avoid the “dissolution” of the Nagaybaks among the neighboring peoples, linguists from Magnitogorsk have created a program for the introduction of the Nagaybak written language. Besides creating the alphabet and writing a concise grammar, the program aims at creating various types of dictionaries of the endangered language. In this situation, Shakhmatov’s lexicographical principles orientated towards the live colloquial speech of the people played a decisive role. After publishing the Russian-Nagaybak and Nagaybak-Russian dictionary, the Nagaybak-Russian dictionary with grammar notes and the dictonary of Nagaybak proverbs, the team faced the task of publishing a Nagaybak phraseological dictionary. Shakhmatov’s principles of describing Russian superword units analyzed in this article served as a basis for addressing this demanding task.