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ETHNONYMS AS A CONSTITUENT PART OF THE REGIONAL ONOMASTICON: THE NORTH-EAST OF RUSSIA AND THE ETHNONYMS CHUKCHA AND CHUKCHANKA AS THE EXAMPLES // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2020. Issue 2 (28). P. 77-89

Regional onomastics is an entangled system that involves names circulating in a specific region, which can be relatively well-known or almost unfamiliar outwards. Today, onomastics is an independent branch of science having as its subject of study both lexemes certainly related to proper names (e. g.: toponyms, hydronyms) and lexemes which lie at the border of propriatives and appellatives, including ethnonyms. Region’s onyms studying helps to find out linguistic links between non-related neighbouring languages, to elicit dialectal features, to discover the places of peoples’ previous habitation, to identify cultural interaction and language borrowings – for that reason this topic is of particular relevance. Regional onyms can be regionalisms from the angle of regional linguistics, insofar as they are representative of a particular locality, but are of little notice or almost unknown beyond of it. This article introduces the concept of onomastic regionalism for clearer description of local onomastic realities in the context of regional linguistics and indicates the difference of onomastic regionalism from the term regional onym. As a rule, ethnonyms of small-numbered peoples do not have wide distribution outside their bearers’ places of residence; for that reason, the author considers them onomastic regionalisms. The study of small ethnic and subethnic groups’ names in Russia it still not sufficient from the point of their regional component, this relates especially to the ethnonyms of the Russian North-East; in that regard, the present topic still abides high relevance of research. The ethnonyms of the Russian North- Eastern indigenous peoples do not have detailed investigation from the position of their involvement in the Far Eastern regional onomasticon. In the present paper the author restrains at investigation of two ethnonyms of one small-numbered people in the Russian North-East – Chukchi; he describes its men and women’s official names, Chukcha and Chukchanka, from the view of the lexical units’ simultaneous attribution to literary language and regiolect. This paper is a theoretical study of the question that the ethnonyms Chukcha and Chukchanka belong to onomastic regionalisms. The author gives a practical example of the Chukcha ethnonym transition from the regiolect to the core of the literary language and gives the reasons why the female derivative of this ethnonym, Chukchanka, remains in the language periphery and of little notice outside Chikchi’s habitat.

Keywords: onomastics, onomasticon, onym, ethnonym, micro-ethnonym, Russian North-East, regionalism (lingustic), onomastic regionalism, regional onym, Chukcha (male Chukchi), Chukchanka (female Chukchi)