On Local Self-Identification of Siberian Village Residents (Based on Autobiographical Short Stories)
Authors:   Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russian Federation), Demeshkina Tatiana A. , Tolstova Maria A. ,   National Research Tomsk State University
Published: March 2022

The article examines the local level of national-territorial self-identification. Interest in this issue is due to extralinguistic and linguistic factors. Extralinguistic factors are associated with increased migration and globalization in the modern world, which leads to a smearing of the territorial and national identity. The relevance of the stated problem is due to its inclusion in the paradigm of modern linguistics that studies the issues of the relationship between language and thinking thus revealing the linguistic potential of the modeling of cognitive processes. The aim of the article is to determine factors on which local self-identification is based. Research materials are autobiographical short stories of people living in the villages of Tomsk Oblast. Local self-identification is understood as the awareness of one's belonging to a certain territory and its community, history and events, which manifests itself in the linguistic picture of the world, in the system of values, ideas, stereotypes and norms, and is reflected in the language. The main source of the material is the texts of the Tomsk dialect corpus, recorded during dialectological expeditions from 1946 to the present in the areas of distribution of Russian old-resident dialects of the Middle Ob region. As an additional source, recollections and oral autobiographical short stories of witnesses of dispossession and exile to the Narym region are used. Local self-identification is expressed most clearly by lexical units with the semantics of belonging to a territory, to a place of residence: mestnyy [local], zdeshniy/izdeshniy [of this place], privezennyy [brought/imported], derevenskiy [rural], korennoy [indigenous]. The analysis of autobiographical stories reveals the actualization of such criteria as birth and permanent residence in a certain area; the presence of ancestors who were born and lived in the same locus as the speaker; emotional attachment to the area, knowledge of the local language, and some others. Local self-identification is expressed in the nominations selo [village]/derevnya [country] and gorod [city], which are endowed with the attributive properties of “ours” (svoy [one's], nash [our], derevenskiy [rural], mestnyy [local], zdeshniy/izdeshniy [of this place], korennoy [indigenous]) and “theirs” (ne nash [not ours], chuzhoy [strange], priyezzhiy [newcomer]). The analysis of the autobiographical short stories of rural residents shows that local self-identification is determined not only by living in a certain territory, but also by the way of life of people, the system of norms, ideas and values. It is inseparable from self-presentation and characteristics of people living in a particular territory. The stereotypical image of a villager reflects, first of all, the specifics of rural existence, which is based on labor and closeness to nature. The local identity of the inhabitants of the Siberian village is formed through the system of oppositions “city-village”, “old-resident-migrant”, “Siberia-European part of Russia”.