The paper discusses Turkic borrowings in the Volga subdialect of the Mari language (Meadow dialect). The thematic group to which our paper is devoted is game vocabulary: words and game terms in Mari folk games (spoken during the game and in narratives about games). The research is based on the material of publications, archival and modern field records. Field studies in recent years have shown that the Volga subdialect contains a specific game vocabulary that is not known in other dialects of the Mari language and missing in the linguistic and ethnographic literature. Also, some lexemes, although they are known in other dialects (not always in game meanings), have a peculiar phonetic character-istics of the Volga subdialect. The purpose of this paper is to present this vocabulary, to introduce it into scientific cir-culation. The article discusses 10 game lexemes of this kind (in the Volga subdialect): kapash 'to grab', potak 'game of catch-up', pashteLATIN SMALL LETTER ENGge 'game of catch-up', chok 'exclamation in the game of hide and seek', choLATIN SMALL LETTER ENGgyrla 'hoop game', kypchakla 'doll game', pakl'ak 'game like skittles', kozla-modyshla 'game of astragalus', chiraka 'game like skittles', maka-maka 'blind man's buff'. Most of them came to the Volga subdialect of the Mari language from Tatar. Thus, the Turkic influence on the Mari game culture and game vocabulary is especially active in the contact zones, in particular, in the southern regions of Mari El Republic bordering Chuvashia and Tatarstan, and the Volga subdialect is the most saturated with Turkisms subdialect of the Meadow Mari. At the same time, there are quite a lot of correspondences in the game vocabulary of the Volga subdialect and the Hill Mari. The analysis revealed that similar lexemes (Turkic bor-rowings) are also present in other Finno-Ugric languages: Udmurt, Mordovian languages, Komi, Hungarian, as well as in Russian dialects.
