PROBLEMS OF DIALECTAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE KARELIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article examines the history of the formation of traditional dialectal classification of the Karelian language, highlights its main problems, and also outlines the ways to solve them. In the course of developing this classification, the administrative principle, based on the volost division of the territory of Karelia at the beginning of the XX century, was used. In Fennistics, there are several variants of this classification, however, they all have a number of specific problems, which can be reduced to the following: 1) the problem of determining the status of individual groups of dialects: Ludic, dialects of Border Karelia, so-called transitional dialects between North Karelian and South Karelian dialects of Karelian Proper; 2) the problem of terminology: on the dialect map of the Karelian language, in fact, supradialects and subdialects are represented, and not dialects; 3) the problem of choosing the basic principle of dialectal division: the administrative principle cannot be used as the dominant one, since the volost boundaries of the beginning of the XX century do not always coincide with typical isoglosses. The article provides illustrative examples that indicate the inconsistency of the existing classification and the need to develop its version based on the results of linguistic analysis. The study is based on the results of the use of two computer programs: a program for comparing dialects of the Karelian language and a program for clustering, based on large volumes of pre-coded dialectal material from the "Dialectological Atlas of the Karelian Language" (1997) (over 38 thousand dialect units). The relevance of the study is due to the urgent need to solve the problems of Karelian dialectology. This is important for determining the actually required number of newly written variants of the Karelian language for the Karelian-speaking population of Russia and Finland.