The ‘childhood world’ in oral stories of the Vologda region inhabitants (on the basis of the Circle of Life electronic database)

The article focuses on the problems of cognitive dialectology and one of its key concepts, that is the dialectal language picture of the world. The authors study the linguistic means of expression of the ‘childhood world’ that includes denomination of children of different ages according to their physical, social, and behavioral characteristics, description of various attributes of childhood (e.g. clothes, toys, diseases), and types of children’s activity (e.g. play, work). In the article, the ‘childhood world’ is presented as a part of the communicative space of Vologda dialects (on the basis of The Vologda dialects dictionary), and as an individual and creative perception of the village life in regional literary works and memoirs and stories of the inhabitants of the Vologda region (on the basis of The Circle of Life electronic database). The authors conclude that the regional vocabulary of childhood reveals such elements of the dialectal language picture of the world as the idea of biological survival, ‘naivety’, utility, stereotypes, expressiveness, as well as the stages of social adaptation in the perception of rural community members.