The Funeral and Memorial Rites of the Old Believers Living in Kunicha Village (Moldova) from an Ethnolinguistic Perspective

Aim. To provide an ethnolinguistic description of the funeral and commemoration rites of the Old Believers of Kunicha village (Moldova), to investigate the specifics of lexicographic fixation of the church and folk terminology of the ritual (pre-burial actions, the funeral day, and the cycle of commemoration). Methodology. The study is based on field interview notes with native speakers of the idiom and cultural tradition (July – August 2022 and 2023). Methods of linguistic analysis (semantic, comparative) of dialect vocabulary and ethnographic reconstruction of ritual features were applied. The noted ethnographic lexicon was examined in its historical and dialectal aspects, drawing on information from I. I. Sreznevsky’s Dictionary (Slovar’ drevnerusskogo yazyka), as the only existing dictionary that contains data on the lexemes across the entire alphabetical list of picked vocabulary. Additionally, the vocabulary of the funeral rite in the Kunicha village was studied using extensive data from regional dialectal dictionaries. Results. A sequential description of the archaic and strictly regulated funeral and commemoration rite is provided. This includes pre-burial actions such as confession, reading the otkhodnaya prayer (prayer for the departing soul), preparation of the body for burial (washing, dressing the deceased, preparing the shroud, placing in the coffin), and reading of the Psalter. It also covers the proceedings of a funeral day such as the removal of the body, the offering of kutia, the ritual of the last kiss, the farewell letter (or “commemorative epistle”), and the commemoration cycle ( tretinki, devyatinki, the fortieth day , and godovshchinki (anniversaries)). A high degree of ritual preservation was identified, which is attributed to the cultural isolation characteristic of the Old Believer population in relation to their surrounding interethnic and interconfessional environment. It was established that most of the analyzed ritual vocabulary (e. g., bozhnitsa, gaytan, kut, mogilki, rushnik ) is widely represented in the modern consolidated dialect dictionary, as well as in the dictionaries of Don, Oryol, Smolensk, and Kursk dialects, indicating its affiliation with the general Russian dialectal background. Research implications. The research fills a gap in the study of the funeral and memorial rites of the Kunicha Old Believers, enriching the overall body of current information for dialectology and ethnolinguistics. The data obtained make a significant contribution to the study of the geography of Russian dialects, confirming the Southern Russian origin of the Kunicha Old Believers, and demonstrate the deep interconnection of language and culture in the context of the preservation of archaic forms. The practical significance of the research is related both to the development and scholarly study of ethnolinguistics and to the teaching of dialectology, lexicology, ethnography, and ethnolinguistics in higher education institutions.