Word in the language of culture of the Old Believers of South America

Ровнова О. Г. Старообрядцы Южной Америки: очерки истории, культуры, языка. 2-е изд. — М.: Издательский дом ЯСК, 2022. — 608 с.

Abstract

This is a review of the book by Olga G. Rovnova, based on the linguistic material collected by the author in 2010–2017 in the communities of Old Believers (chasovennye) in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay. The book includes essays on the history, culture and the Russian dialectal language of the Old Believers, as well as a fragment of the “Dictionary of the Dialect of the Old Believers of South America”, on which Olga G. Rovnova has worked for many years. The author analyzes the sociolinguistic situation in the communities of the Old Believers of South America and identifies a set of most important features of the dialects that have not been affected by the standardized literary Russian language. She characterizes the confessional and national self-identification of the Old Believers based on their language, the oral and written forms of the dialect, and the ways of coexisting of Russian and other languages in different local traditions. The book also proposes a solution to the question of establishing the linguistic ancestral homeland of the Old Believers — the territory of their maternal dialects (north-east of Nizhny Novgorod, south-west of Kirov and east of Kostroma regions).

Received: 19.01.2023.

Citation
Belova O. V. Word in the language of culture of the Old Believers of South America // Slavic Almanac. 2023. No 1–2. P. 468–477 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2023.1-2.6.03