Our own words: participation of schoolchildren volunteers in collecting regional language material

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to inform about the role schoolchildren volunteers can play in collecting regional vocabulary, as well as about the material collected as a result of the work of such a project — “Regional Features of Russian Speech” implemented in 2019 in 32 regions of Russia. As part of the project, the collection of regional vocabulary was carried out by local school teams under the guidance of teachers and in constant communication with a linguist curator. The participants used sociolinguistic methods and the method of mapping linguistic facts. Based on the results of the study, the team created its own Google map, placing on it labels of selected words according to the place where the use of the words was recorded. A project map was created from the team cards. As a result, the project geographic information system was filled with objects — regional words. On the map you can see entries, including a word, its interpretation and context, created in a specific locality. In total, about 3,000 units were collected, including both neologisms, such as the Far Eastern brasmatik ‘mascara’ or the Samara bishka ‘SMS asking to call back’, as well as old dialect words that have merged into regional varieties of the Russian language.