Functioning of the Russian borrowings in the vocabulary of Moksha subdialects

Introduction. The article analyzes the borrowed vocabulary from the Russian language in the dialects of the modern Republic of Mordovia and beyond. The subject of the analysis is the quantitative composition and dimorphism of the Russian borrowings in the subdialects of the Moksha language.
Materials and Methods. The authors used various research methods, with the main one being descriptive. Additionally, the elements of the distributional and component analysis methods were applied. The linguistic material consisted of the Russian borrowings extracted from the authors' field observations, the Moksha-Russian dictionary, and the Mordovian dictionary by H. Paasonen.
Results and Discussion. The structural and semantic features of the Russian borrowings in the subdialects of the Moksha language functioning on the territory of Mordovia and beyond are identified and analyzed. During the research, the reasons were identified, and the main ways of semantic development of individual meanings of words (narrowing and widening) were considered. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that, for the first time, a lexical-semantic analysis of about 100 lexical units functioning in the Moksha dialects' speech has been conducted. The systematization of the analyzed language units, belonging to various lexical-semantic groups, allowed documenting previously undescribed linguistic phenomena associated with the expressive capabilities of the Moksha dialectal lexicon.
Conclusion. The research has practical significance, and its results can be used in the development of educational and methodological materials on Moksha dialectology, University teaching practices for courses such as “Moksha Dialectology”, “Russian Dialectology”, and related special courses designed for students majoring in humanities.