SOCIAL VARIATION OF A REGIOLECT.

The real situation of linguistic variation is extremely complicated, as far as not only dialects and literary language, but also all other forms of language existence are included into the processes of territorial variation. Thus, language variation is the result of the simultaneous influence of both territorial and social factors. The subject of the research is variation of the frequency of phonetic and lexical regional-specific speech features under the influence of such social factors as gender, age, place of birth and education. The research focuses on the Perm regiolect of the Russian language. The research method is statistical analysis of regional peculiarities of pronunciation and use of regional lexis in spontaneous monologues of the native speakers. The sample of informants (56 people) is balanced according to the gender, age (3 age groups), place of birth (the capital of the region, other settlements) and education (secondary, higher). The research material demonstrates that phonetic and lexical regional features depend on the same social factors – “place of birth” and “age”. Therefore, it can be assumed that territorial and social factors make up specific clusters within a regiolect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]