Dialect Dictionary

(in Russian, oblastnoislovar’), a dictionary containing a more or less complete listing of words used in folk dialects; such words have not been accepted into the national literary language.

A dialect dictionary may be described as a dialectal lexicon compiled in the territory in which a given language is spoken (for example, An Experimental Dialect Dictionary of Great Russian, 1852; V. I. Dai’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, parts 1–4, 1863–66; and the Dictionary of Russian Folk Dialects, fases. 1–10, 1965–74). Some dialect dictionaries are the dialectal lexicons of a consirable portion of the territory in which a language is spoken (for example, A. I. Podvysotskii’s Dictionary of the Dialect of Arkhangelsk Region in Its Everyday and Ethnological Application, 1885). Others cover the territory of a single dialect (for example, the Dictionary of Contemporary Russian Folk Dialect, 1969).

The lexicon of a dialect dictionary is based on the differential principle—that is, the presence of differential characteristics, which may be expressed as differences either in the external phonetic form of words or in their semantics.