Russian folk language description of the Tobolsk province according to the ethnographic program of the Russian Geographical Society (based on the manuscripts of 1848–1891 from the archive of the Russian Geographical Society)

The article is devoted to the presentation of archival handwritten lexical materials characterizing the local speech of the inhabitants of Western Siberia in the second half of the 19^th century. The manuscripts were compiled by scientific volunteers at the request of the Ethnographic Program of the Russian Geographical Society. The texts of the Siberian correspondents contain the author's dictionaries of local words, as well as notes on the phonetic and grammatical features of the speech of Siberians in certain districts of the Tobolsk province and samples of folk speech. Comparison with lexicographic sources of the 19, 20 and 21 centuries allowed us to find that the Siberian materials introduced into scientific circulation partially fill in the gaps in the history of the Russian language and its dialects, actualizing the problems of corpus areal linguistics. Manuscripts record: a) the identity and differences in the lexical semantics of words in the records of the 19^th century, made in different territories of the Tobolsk province, b) semantic variants of the word and shifts in its meaning over time and with the advance of the Russian population deep into Siberia, c) a certain semantic stability in different regions and over the centuries.