Към характеристиката на тайните говори в България

The paper is based on speech samples from the secret professional jargon of the masons, in the South Western part of Bulgaria. The first part of the paper discusses some basic rules for the formation of lexicons in similar social dialect types. These are lexical borrowing from neighbouring languages, metaphoric and pejorative usage, independent word-formation, semantic calques, etc. The second part of the paper presents an etymological analysis of the lexicon of the secret jargon under discussion. Some existing etymologies have been expanded and/or corrected and some new ones have been proposed.