On the Study of Nonstandard Mineral Vocabulary in the Russian Language: Articulation of the Issue

This article introduces the reader to the variety of Russian vocabulary that denotes minerals, mineraloids, rocks, which lies outside the framework of the official scholarly nomenclature. The author suggests that the term nonstandard mineral vocabulary be used to refer to this layer of vocabulary; in a narrow sense, it includes the names of minerals themselves, and in a broader sense, it can include words of adjacent thematic groups naming processes and phenomena related to the existence of minerals in nature and culture, their extraction and processing, etc. The author identifies sociolinguistic layers that make up nonstandard mineralogical vocabulary in its narrow sense: dialect; professional vocabulary and slang; argotic; colloquial words. A special place is occupied by names that have emerged as a result of artificial nomination (in particular, trade names). The article also lists some thematic groups related to mineral vocabulary in a broad sense (a group of words denoting features of the structure of minerals; peculiarities of their occurrence; designations of people who mine and process stones; nominations of stone products; vocabulary from the sphere of mythology and beliefs related to stones, etc.). Each classification position is illustrated by language material from lexicographic and book sources; also data from the Vocabulary, Toponymy, Ethnography of Minerals card file, currently formed by the staff of the Department of the Russian Language, General Linguistics, and Speech Communication of Ural Federal University, is introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time. The author focuses on issues around nonstandard mineral vocabulary that exist in linguistics today: it seems to lie “in the blind zone” of linguistics as it is insufficiently collected, poorly introduced into scholarly circulation, and understudied. There is a need to fill this gap in a systematic way.