Dialectisms in Olha Pavlenko’s collection «Brother came to visit»

The article draws attention to the importance of studying the use of dialectisms and their function in fiction. It notes that Ukrainian linguistics has made significant progress in studying the dialectal features of individual dialects represented in the works of Ukrainian writers. Writers of previous centuries introduced regional words into their texts to establish them in the literary language, while contemporary writers use dialectisms to record the richness of dialects and preserve them for future generations. The phonetic and morphological dialectisms used in Olha Pavlenko’s collection «Brother came to visit» have been analysed. It is noted that the dialectisms of different linguistic levels that function in the texts of O. Pavlenko’s works do not require explanation, as they are entirely understandable from the context and reflect the current state of the dialect of the village of Babanka in the Uman district of the Cherkasy oblast. The use of phonetic and morphological dialectisms is observed in the speech of the characters, less often in the author’s speech. The consistency with which dialectal units are introduced into the linguistic fabric of the literary text attests to the static nature of many linguistic phenomena in the dialect of the village of Babanka, for example, the use of the prosthetic consonants [г], [в]; the dispalatalised [р]; dispalatalised [т] in verb personal endings; the absence of alternation [т], [д], [з], [с] in verb forms; word stem truncation, metathesis, the absence of differentiation of noun endings according to the declension paradigm, the formation of degrees of comparison of adjectives using the suffix -ішч, etc., and confirmed by researchers of Eastern Podillia dialects in descriptive and lexicographical works. It has been concluded that Olha Pavlenko deliberately introduces lexemes that reflect the phonetic and morphological features of the dialect into the test, while most authors of literary texts introduce lexical and phraseological ones. Dialect words enliven the text and transport the reader into the realm of colloquial speech. The use of dialect forms from Eastern Podillia dialects is a defining feature of Olha Pavlenko’s idiolect.