Lexical rarities of the ethnic cultural borderland

The article offers an analysis of dialect lexical examples from the archival materials of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries and the end of the 20th century. The author’s aim is to clarify their existence in modern dialects of the Russian-Belarusian borderland. The region under study is a spatially complexly structured area where different ethnic, language and cultural traditions coexist. Several examples from the archives of the Smolensk region were selected for the study: phrasemes, chrononyms, names of folk demonology characters and terms related to magical rituals. Such “lexical rarities”, the cultural semantics of which are of interest to ethnolinguists, dialectologists, and folklorists, are also markers thanks to which a modern researcher can fix the boundaries of dialect microareals, clarify the geography of the existence of lexical units with the loss of their ethnographic context (for example, folk ritual).