The Key Concepts of Traditional Spiritual Culture and the Means of Their Expression in the Lexicon of Dialect Speakers

The paper presents a study of dialect speakers’ lexicon excerpt correlated with the sphere of traditional spiritual culture. A classification of an extensive array of facts recorded whilst surveying the informants in the points of mixed residence in Volgograd region is proposed. The research is carried out in line with the established methodological principles of linguistic units interpretation, and is based on the material extracted from the speech recordings of native speakers of the Don and Ukrainian dialects. The study focused on the key concepts in the spiritual culture of the Russian-Ukrainian population of the region. The concepts are verbalized in the speech of dialect speakers, whose way of life, traditions and customs reflect the life of a nationally heterogeneous continuum. The lexical units relevant for the transition of culturally significant information are defined. It is revealed regarding the content-and-semantic principle of detailing information in the text (within the framework of themes and microthemes) and the semantic-and-categorical means of representing ethnocultural meanings in context (within situations and micro-situations). For residents of mixed settlements, the topics “Ethnic identification of dialect speakers”, “Kinship. Family. Kinship and family relations, traditions”, “Calendar and folk rituals, customs and beliefs”, “Leisure amusements, folk games, fun”, “Nature in traditional spiritual culture”, “Folk medicine, healing”, “Folk etiquette, moral norms of behavior in society, community” are noted to be significant. The article describes the procedure for segmenting an excerpt of dialect speakers’ lexicon into individual topics that reflect traditional culture in its spiritual component; it shows the lexical content of microthemes recorded in the stories of Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking informants; and provides the description of lexical means significant for the realization of these ethno-cultural meanings.