Hnatyuk M. North Lemkian Immigrants’ Dialects: Phonological-Phonetic Features.

Thesis is devoted to the study of the phonological and phonetic level of North Lemkivski dialects, the dialects which, due to the reformatting the political map of Europe, were deliberately settled in different regions of Ukraine, in particular, in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. For the first time the sound system of modern dialects and features of their functioning in the conditions of non-compact living of native speakers in the western Ukrainian area (mostly in Transdnistrianskyi dialect continuum) at the end of the XX – the beginning of the XXI century on the material of unique records of coherent speech of different age groups, collected during 1998–2019, is integrally investigated in thesis. The characteristic of sound fields of vowels and consonant phonemes is unified and practical bases of specificity of their description from the point of view of dialectology are developed. The influence of non-dialectal environment and literary language on the speech of North Lemkian speakers is taken into account. On the basis of the processed factual material the phonemic oppositions are investigated, the distribution of phonemes is revealed, the positional and combinatorial sound changes are clarified, the specificity of paroxitonic stress is characterized. The ability of some respondents to switch code (literary language) / subcode (dialectal speech) according to the communicative situation was revealed. The notion of the dialects prestige is introduced, which directly follows from the self-identification of dialect speakers.