The aim of the research is to find out what words are used in Lithuanian and Latvian to name the rural population. The study was performed by applying descriptive, comparative and quantitative methods. The novelty of the article is the presentation of the Lithuanian language material in Latvian, as well as the analysis of the Latvian language material and the comparison of the meanings and use of Lithuanian and Latvian words. The study is sociolinguistic, not normative; therefore, not only systematic but also contextual, situational synonymy is important. Dictionaries and texts of literary and common languages, synonyms, slang and jargon, the text of the current Lithuanian language (Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstynas) and the Latvian language text corpus (Latviešu valodas tekstu korpuss), are the main sources. A Lithuanian word kaimietis (‘a villager’), which has long been a neutral name for a rural resident or a person born in a village, is a synonym for both neutral and stylistically connoted words. The most common synonyms are sodietis (‘a homestead peasant’) and valstietis (‘a peasant’). In this synonym sequence, a peasant is a remote word that includes the concept “kaimo gyventojas” (‘a rural resident’) and the concept “žemdirbys” (‘an agriculturalist’), thus linking the synonym sequence of the word a villager to a word farmer in the sequence of synonyms ūkininkas (‘a farmer’), laukininkas (‘a field peasant’). Recently, the word kaimietis (‘a villager’) has acquired a second – pejorative – meaning: “sakoma apie neišsilavinusį, prasto skonio ir pan. žmogų, kuris nebūtinai kilęs iš kaimo” (‘it is said of an uneducated, a person of poor taste, and so on, a person who does not necessarily come from the countryside’). It is already recorded in the written dictionary of the common language, which indicates that the common connoted meaning in slang is codified. The word kaimietis (‘a villager’), used in a pejorative sense, appears in the order of words that have a systemic or contextual pejorative meaning, as well as in a despising way: prastuolis, prasčiokas, mužikas, runkelis. The name of the villager in Latvian – the word laucinieks (‘a villager’) – is stylistically neutral, its synonyms consist of the neutral words lauksaimnieks (‘a farmer’) and zemnieks (‘a peasant’). The word zemnieks, similarly to the valstietis (‘a peasant’) in Lithuanian, is the dominant in the order of distant synonyms zemkopis (‘an agriculturalist’) and zemesrūķis [?]. The approach to the synonym sādžinieks (‘a homestead peasant’) is ambiguous: its definition in current dictionaries associates the word either with Latgale or Russia, although according to its origin, it is considered to be a borrowing from the Lithuanian language. The word with root lauk- (from word ‘field’) lauķis [?] is used in a pejorative sense in Latvian (its shade is similar to the Lithuanian words prasčiokas (‘a hick’) and runkelis (‘a person as mindless as a beetroot’)), as well as slang word pāķis [?] and barbarisms – slavism mužiks (‘a kern’), Germanism bauris [?] (in jargon bauers). The material of Lithuanian and Latvian texts shows that in both Lithuanian and Latvian, the words of different connotations are used synonymously in different contexts.
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