The phonetics of the Ukrainian language has a lot of features that significantly distinguish it from other Slavic languages; for example, none of the adjacent Slavic languages has the same reflexes *ě or newly closed *o as Ukrainian has. Of all the language levels of Ukrainian dialects, it is the sound level which is decisive for clarifying the status of the dialect and differentiating the dialect range.
The influence of neighbouring dialect systems and the literary language, an increase in the level of literacy of the population and a noticeable annual decrease in the number of typical speakers increases the urgency of the professional study of dialect speech.
The work analyzes the history of the study of the phonetic system of three dialects of the Ukrainian language. It has been noted that the first dialectological works have already contained information about sound features; the opposition of phonetic features became the basis for the division of the dialect range and the compilation of the first linguistic maps.
The sound level of speech of the south-western dialect was investigated most comprehensively; however, most often the object of interest of the researchers was the system of vowels of the northern dialects, in particular, the history of the development of etymological *о, *е, *ě in the northern and southern dialect zones, the process of monophthongization of these manifestations and the articulator-acoustic specificity of Polissia diphthongs. The phonetic system of the West Polissiya dialect is the least researched in this group; this dialect is bypassed by the main isoglosses of Polissia and thus clearly different from the other two Polissia dialects, having its own unique history of formation. Due to the complex historical development, the tragic events of the 20th century and redrawing the borders, the specificity of the West Polissiya dialect is that it includes three modern parts in its composition, they are: Pidliassia, Berestey-Pinsk and Volyn Polissia.
It has been found that the first two mentioned areas in the phonetic aspect were studied thoroughly, but the core – Volyn Polissiya dialects was studied only fragmentarily, in particular, small areas were analyzed: Luboml, Nadsarny, Volodymyr, Prybuzhzhia, Turiisk, Zgorany, Kivertsi.
For the first time the dissertation has systematically investigated the phonetic level of Volyn Polissiya dialects on the basis of the connected speech of the dialect native speakers who were born in the 1920s – early 40s, and the corpus of phonetic dialects with clear localization recorded in currently available research papers (covering 240 villages of Volyn, Rivne and partly Lviv regions).
We have established that the system of vocalism of the dialects of Volyn Polissia, as well as the rest of the northern dialects, depends on the stress, that accented and non-accented vocalisms have six phonemes: [і], [и], [е], [а], [о], [у], and in the transition zone to the Middle Polissia the number of phonemes can reach eight. It was found that the vowel [и] < *о, *е, *ě and unstressed vocals [у] < *о, [и] < *е, *ě have a higher frequency in the stressed position.
The specificity of functioning of vowels in the dialects of the Volyn Polissia was analyzed and the following features of vocalism were established: monophthongs [і], [и] in place of etymological *о, *е, *ě, absence of sounds of heterogeneous articulation in this position; diphthongs [͜іе], [͜іи] are possible in dialects of the transitional to Middle Polissia type, where they function simultaneously with monophthongs [y], [o], [e].
In unstressed closed and open syllables *o, *e are realized by sounds [o] and [e], but [о] < *о is more is labialized similarly to the vowel [y], and [и] < *е increases articulation to [и], with the typical manifestation of *ě > [и]. Nasal *ę in the stressed position > [ʼа], which in the northwestern part after soft consonants is implemented positional [ʼе]; in the unstressed – [ʼа], reflexes [e] (in several dialects of the northeastern range), [и] (in the eastern part), [i] (in the eastern, central and southern parts) are possible. A typical manifestation of *ǫ is the sound [y]. The preservation of *i is not represented to the same extent in the entire territory of the Polissia and depends on the quality of the preceding consonant.
Combinatorial changes of sounds in the Volyn-Polissia area have been studied, and it has been found that forms with assimilative-dissimilative processes and prothetic consonants dominate, and apheresis is the most popular type of sound loss.
The phonetic features of the dialects of Volyn Polissia have been drawn on 49 atomic maps, and the Atlas of the Phonetic Features of Volyn Polissia has been compiled. Based on the analysis of sound phenomena, 9 summary maps have been created and seven speech groups have been singled out: southern, eastern, northeastern, northwestern, Volodymyr, Manevychi-Kivertsi and central.
