Stylistics of dialect and obsolete words

Dialect units lie outside the literary norm, so they are not used in the scientific, official and publicistic styles. They find a place in plain conversation and in the artistic style: a writer deliberately brings in a dialect word to show which region a character is from, to create local colour or to depict life truthfully. Obsolete words are of two kinds. In an archaism the concept still exists but another word now expresses it (yov – dushman “enemy”, kent – shahar “town”); a historical word is obsolete because the concept itself has disappeared (mingboshi “head of a thousand”, mirshab “a night guard in the khanates”, xonlik “khanate”). Historical words are used to depict the past realistically, while archaisms give historical colour and elevation, especially in artistic and publicistic texts.