In 1987 the village Vadyuga belonged to the Gorky village council (the center of which is Sogra). It is located at the confluence of the Vadyuga and Pinega rivers, and had 45 houses and 236 inhabitants in 1920. Despite the fact that Vadyuga was destroyed by fire in 1957, causing a part of the population to move, it still remained a large village in the 1980s, with its own state-owned animal farm, primary school, community center and first aid post. After the liquidation of the state-owned farm "Gorkovsky" in the 90s, only one job (that of salesman) and about 20 houses were left in the village, where little more than 20 people live in winter and up to 100 in summer.
The villages of Vasilevo, Eskino, Zaitsevo (Gavrilovskaya), Kalasnema, Kudrina Gora, Lamleva, Podol/Podolskaya, Romanov Ostrov, Tuzhikovo and Tineva, located on the river Vyya (the left tributary of the Pinega), used to form the independent Keretskaya (Kerezhskaya) volost, which was part of the Dvina land, which later became the Dvinsky district (from 1616 to 1780 - Kevrolsky) of the Arkhangelsk province. From 1780 to 1796 were part of the Krasnoborsky district of the Vologda province, and later the Malopinezhsky camp of the Solvychegodsky district of the Vologda province. From 1837 to 1867 they constituted the Gavrilov rural society together with the other Vyya villages, which, together with the Gorsky rural society (the territory of the Gorkovsky village council), belonged to the Mamontinsky volost of the 2nd camp. From 1867 to 1918 they belonged to the Gavrilov volost of the 3rd camp of the Solvychegodsky district of the Vologda province [Administrative territorial division 1997; 135-137].
Since 1924 there were two village councils along the Vyya river - Gavrilovsky and Vyisky. In 1960 they were merged into one Vyisky village council with the center in Okulovskaya village at the confluence of the Vyya and Pinega rivers. The Vyya river flows from west to east; a large cluster of villages (Vasilevo, Eskino, Zaitsevo, Kalasnema, Kudrina Gora, Lamleva, Podol, Romanov Ostrov, Tuzhikovo) is located approximately 15 km to the west of Okulovskaya, and Tineva village is another 15 km up the river. There are no more settlements further up the river now (and there were none in 1990).
According to the administration of the municipal formation "Vyyskoye", as of January 1, 2009, the following number of permanent residents lived in the Gavrilovsky villages: in the village of Eskino - 1 person, in Zaitsevo - 6, in Kudrina Gora - 5, in Podolskaya - 13, in Romanov Ostrov - 30, in Tineva - 3, in Tuzhikovo - 2. There is no permanent population in the villages of Kalasnema and Lamlevo. The village of Vasilevo was resettled in 1957.
The villages surveyed during the fieldtrips were located in hard-to-reach areas with almost impassable roads. In Vadyuga in 1987, electricity was supplied to the houses from the local diesel station for two hours in the morning and in the evening during the milking of the cows. In Tineva there was no electricity at all in 1990.
Dialects of the upper Pinega and Vyya river basins are especially interesting from a historical and linguistic geographical perspective, since they are located on a territory where migration flows from Novgorod and the Rostov-Suzdal lands are assumed to have met. (The local residents themselves reported that according to legend they came from Novgorod.) In 1928 and 1929 these dialects were surveyed by P. S. Kuznetsov in order to refine the borders of Pomor group of the Northern Russian dialects, and to identify the paths of colonization of these territories. According to Kuznetsov , migration flows did not come from the north and go upstream of the Pinega, but from the south - from the Dvina through the drainage divide of the Pinega and the Upper Toima [Kuznetsov 1949]. The data obtained by P. S. Kuznetsov is compared to the results of the surveys from 1987 and 1990 in [Knyazev, Levina, Pozharitskaya 1997]; see [Knyazev, Pronina 2021] about intonation in these dialects, [Knyazev 2022a; 2022b].
One of the most striking linguistic features of the Upper Pinega and Vyya dialects is the so-called word by word tonal arrangement of an utterance [Kuznetsov 1949: 14], where “almost every word in a phrase gets its own melodic arrangement, thus becoming isolated from neighboring words” [Paufoshima 1983: 64]. By the end of the 20th century this feature was still preserved in the speech of almost all consultants of the dialects presented in the corpus, while at the same time this intonation had practically disappeared in the dialects of the middle course of the Pinega [Paufoshima 1989: 60].
One more specific feature of these dialects involves the extensive use of particles (a, da, ak, dak, I, bole, bat, byvat, ek, he, uzh, ved’, -to (-ta, -tu, -te, -ot and others), which act as a means of prosodic arrangement [Nikitina, Pozharitskaya 1993], among other functions [Post 2005], [Pozharitskaya 2010].
Among other notable features of the upper Pinega and Vyya dialect are five-phoneme vocalism; regular change of [a] to [e] between palatalized consonants together with isolated instances of the sound [i] in place of ѣ; existence of palatal consonants (juxtaposition of all consonants articulated with the tongue according to the place of articulation instead of the secondary articulation of palatalization); widely spread pronouns with the component -tam (tetam, tuttam, ottultam, pozatottam), and also verbal forms with “doubled imperfectiveness” (davyval ‘gave’, poplakival ‘cried’, taplivat’ ‘to heat’) [Pozharitskaya 1991] and “complex past” forms (with or without agreement): byla sgorela ‘be.PST-FEM burn.PST-FEM’, byl vernulsya ‘be.PST-MASC come_back.PST-MASC’, byli ushli ‘be.PST-PL leave.PST-PL’, bylo prishel ‘be.PST-NEUT come.PST-MASC’ [Pozharitskaya 2015]. Of particular interest are complex future tense forms with perfective verbs (budet raskryazhuyu ‘be.FUT-3SG chop_tree.FUT-1SG’, chego sdelaet so mnoy budet ‘what-GEN do.FUT-3SG with me be.FUT-3SG’).
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