Russian Substantive Loanwords and Their Adaptation in Jogopera Votic

The paper is devoted to Russian substantive loanwords in the Jogopera sub-dialect of Votic. The analyzed data are taken from the dictionary compiled by Dmitrij Tsvetkov and checked with native speakers in the course of the author's field work. In most cases the borrowed nouns in this dialect differ from the original Russian words by their final segments. In some nouns the final vowel of the original word is lost; another group adds a vowel (a, i or u) that is missing in the Russian word; and in the last group the original final vowel is changed. The paper discusses several hypotheses concerning the reasons for such diversity: dependence upon the phonetic structure; borrowing of particular case forms; correlation between the type of change and the period of borrowing, etc. The analysis proves that none of the hypotheses is able to explain all the cases of change. However, the diversity in adaptation strategies can be explained by different language processes. At that, all types of changes serve a definite goal: to make the shape of the loanword different from the original one. Such a goal appears due to the low social status of Votic, which language needs to protect itself from being mixed up with Russian.