Lavrenti Hovhannisyan, contemporary Armenian linguist, Doctor of Philology, Professor, Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, has authored a series of scientific works dedicated to the Karabakh dialect. In his works, he has examined the archaic phonetical, lexical, and grammatical features of the dialect in order to prove the existence of the Armenian population in Artsakh since ancient times. Among the most characteristic phonetic phenomena, he highlights the deafening of the initial voiced consonants in Classical Armenian, in some cases aspiration and palatalization of these consonants, which he does not associate with Turkic influence, the absence of the “f” sound and the presence of oxytonic stress.

KeywordsKarabakh (Artsakh) dialect L. Hovhannisyan Classical Armenian Iranian languages phonetic system lexis grammatical system loanwords etymology archaisms.

The borrowed words in the Karabakh dialect, when compared to their meanings in Russian, may have either retained their original meaning or undergone various semantic changes. One of the manifestations of semantic changes is the use of these borrowed words in phraseological units. The phraseological units are mainly composed of borrowed subordinate components and Armenian dominant components. Phraseological units with communicative meaning – that is, those functioning as a sentence – are relatively few; they mainly have a simple structure; one-member phraseological units are also encountered.

KeywordsKarabakh dialect Russian vocabulary borrowing phraseological unit semantic change root affix.