Third person verbal affixes in Opochka dialects

The article is devoted to the variability of third person verbal affixes in the present
tense in the dialect around Opochka. This work considers spoken texts of speakers whose
speech includes verb forms with dialectal affixes. For each informant the quantitative
distribution of word forms based on the conjugation, number, and stress is provided. Attention
was also paid to how various sociolinguistic factors affect the use of dialectal affixes.
These factors include the speakers' age, level of education, occupation, and place
of living. In order to determine how the use of dialect forms of the verb depends on these
sociolinguistic factors, the article employs the chi-squared test. Additionally, the process
of the loss of dialect variants of affixes was analyzed based on the material of four
speakers in whose speech variability was observed. The paper explores the implications
of the results obtained from this analysis, which suggest that certain dialect affixes may
be more stable than others.