The dialect of the village Sknyatino in the Kalyazinsky district, Tver’ region

The publication features a detailed phonetic transcript of an audio recording of the interview
with a dialect speaker, accompanied by a brief description of the dialect.
The recording was made on a Roland-09 Edirol recorder in .wav format in the summer of
2019 during an expedition to the Sknyatino village, Nerlskiy rural settlement. The informant —
Vera I. Sorokina born in 1947 — speaks about herself, her relatives and fellow villagers, and
gives vivid details of the life of the village during the periods of collectivization, Stalinist repressions,
the Second World War and post-war years, and later, more prosperous times. Her
story contains interesting examples of Russian and Soviet folklore and poetry.
The text presents a Western Central Russian dialect, in which the following characteristic
features are observed: inconsistent okanye, in which there are about 2,5 times more cases of
pronunciation of [o] in the first pre-stressed syllable than cases of pronunciation of non-o ([a]
or [ъ]); distinguishing [a] as a reflex of /a/ and [e] as a reflex of /e/ or /o/ in the first prestressed
syllable after soft consonants; vowel [y] in place of [o] in the second pre-stressed onsetless
syllable along with examples of [o] in this position; reduction to zero in the second
pre-stressed syllable after hard consonants; single examples of the loss of j in the intervocalic
position and of vowel contraction; non-palatalized [s] in the verbal postfix; competition of the
endings -am and -ami in the plural instrumental forms of nouns; cases of omission of prepositions,
usually v.