Keyword: «vernacular»

The article is devoted to the analysis of the linguistic features of «The Tales of Frol Skobeev» in order to find out the author’s status, to characterize the speech basis of the story. The story is a recording of a text originally created as an oral narration, expressed by means of vernacular. The story was created under the influence of book-writing tradition and business speech of the era, but its basis had the vernacular nature, which in the early 18th century began to be formed as a functional variety of the Russian national language.