Phonetic features of the Gaina subdialect of the northwestern dialect of the Bashkir language (based on the material collected in the Bardymsky district of Perm Krai)

Abstract

The study aims to describe the current linguistic state of the phonetic features characterising the Gaina subdialect of the northwestern dialect of the Bashkir language involving the material collected in the Bardymsky district of Perm Krai. The study is novel in that it is the first in Bashkir linguistics to consider the features of the Gaina subdialect in a comprehensive manner using the example of the Bardymsky district of Perm Krai, as well as taking into account the impact of socio-economic and socio-political changes on the spiritual culture of the above-mentioned subject of the Russian Federation. As a result of analysing the oral linguistic material collected from residents of more than thirty settlements in the Bardymsky district of Perm Krai, it has been found that the language of the Gaina people is very distinctive and differs significantly from dialects of the Bashkir and Tatar languages in terms of preservation of ancient linguistic features, especially phonetic and morphological ones. The phonetic and orthoepic features of the subdialect include such phenomena as the narrowing of wide vowels in the positions of a stressed checked syllable, less often also in a free syllable, sounds alternations, both of vowels and consonants, reduction, prothesis, epenthesis, labialisation, palatal harmony loss (when certain affixes are attached to words and in the process of elision), dropping of sounds, positional length of vowels.