Variation of the genitive plural forms of the noun god ‘year’ in dialect corpora

The presence of the genitive plural suppletive form let in the paradigm of the noun god ‘year’ distinguishes Russian from other East Slavic languages. In Russian dialects, instead of let, the dialect variant godov is sometimes used. Data from the panchronic subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus show that the form godov, which is first attested in the 15th century, was peripheral throughout the history of the Russian language. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was mainly used in non-fiction texts, while in the 19th century it was already considered as outdated or dialectal. In modern dialect data, the variant godov is highly frequent: it is present in almost half of about 2,000 contexts considered. The article aims to investigate the factors that influence the probability of using the dialect variant godov in constructions with cardinal numeral in modern dialects of Russian. The dialect variant is frequent in different dialect groups, which does not support an analysis of variation in terms of areal distribution. Moreover, variation between the two forms differs even among speakers of the same dialect, which makes the data particularly suitable to a variationist analysis. Data annotation included the following sociolinguistic parameters: gender, year of birth, and level of education. In addition, we tagged each data point according to the case form of the numeral and word order. The significance of these variables was evaluated with a mixed effect logistic regression. The results of statistical analysis showed that the probability of using the dialect form is much higher for less educated speakers as compared to more educated ones. Inverse word order and genitive case form of the numeral also increase the probability of using the dialect variant.