This year was no exception. From June 22 to July 10, sophomore students of the department of Russian Philology, under the guidance of Marina Flyagina, Head of the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics at the Institute of Philology, Journalism and Intercultural Communication of the Southern Federal University, and Natalia Kalinicheva, senior lecturer at the department, underwent dialectological practice, studied the dialects of the Bolshoy Log and Kh. Beekeeping Aksai district, Rostov region.

The main task of the expedition is to collect dialect material on the territory of the former Donskoy Army Region, that is, the territory where the distinctive Don dialect was formed. Right now, in the conditions of the destruction of the village and the outflow of the population to the cities, it is necessary to actively record the language and traditional spiritual culture of the inhabitants of the region. The collected data make it possible to significantly enrich Russian studies with factual material, to identify the processes taking place in modern dialects. Audio recordings, video recordings, and photographs taken during the expeditions provide new information not only to dialectologists, but also to language historians, ethnographers, and cultural scientists. In addition, decoding and annotating audio recordings of modern dialects allows for a comparative analysis with materials collected by Don dialectologists in the middle of the last century.

During the internship, students worked in groups of three, each of whom interviewed informants of different ages and social status. The collection of field material was carried out in various ways: they listened to and recorded the live speech of the villagers on audio media, lexical dialectal features were recorded in paper form, making dialect dictionaries. A considerable amount of photographic materials was also collected.

From the stories of local residents, young researchers learned about the wedding tradition, calendar folk festivals, local cuisine and the specifics of the economic activities of the population of Nizhny Don. On one of the field days, the students visited the village of Starocherkasskaya, went on an excursion to the Starocherkassk Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, during which they learned about the history of the old capital of the Don Cossacks, the way of life and traditions of the Lower Don Cossacks.

Speakers of the dialect of the older generation, whose speech contains the largest number of dialect features, are leaving, so fixing the oral speech of these people is an urgent and urgent need, and involving philology students in this work contributes not only to the development of research competencies, but also to the patriotic education of the younger generation, their familiarization with the history and culture of their native country.