The creation of associative dictionary is one of the long-term trends in an associative-verbal study of two ethnoses. They are Russian and Altai people living on the same territory in a bilingual situation.

The dictionary consists of three parts. The first part presents associative reactions of the Altai people who live in Gorno-Altaisk and territories of a dialectal group "Altai-kizhi”. The second one deals with bilingual Altai people of the same territory. The third part gives the reactions of Russian people. These three part are given in parallel.

Ethnonim "the Altai people”, "the Altai nationality” is used in an everyday notion and in special scientific literature to indicate the whole population of Gorny Altai and at the same time a part of the Southern Altai people that are Known as "Altai-kizhi”. In this work we speak only about "Altai-kizhi” – the Altai people living in Ongudai, Ust-Kan, Elikmanar, Shebalin regions.

In the context of N.S. Trubetskoi’s Europe-Asian world view the given associative dictionary of one of many Turks speaking nationalities presents the fact of ethnolinguistic community and the material that explains Russian-Turks unity phenomenon.

Today the Altai people are the native population of Altai Republic Ethnic situation on the Republic territory looks like that: according to 1989 census there are 59,1 thousand of the Altai people of different ethnic groups that makes 31% of the Republic population; there are 60,4% of Russian people; 5,6% of Kazakhs; 0,9% of Ukrainians, etc. The Northern group of the Altai people includes tubalars (tuba-kizhi), chelkants (koo-kizhi), kumandints (kumandi-kizhi). The Southern group includes altai-kizhi, telengits, teleses, teleuts.

The linguistic situation on the territory of Altai Republic is very complicated. The Altai language was influenced by Mongolian, Samodiyski, Ugorski languages. That’s why nowadays there are several dialects on the territory of Altai that differ from each other by classification indications.

The modern alphabet of the Altai literary language and with 33 letters of the Russian alphabet there are also 4 Altai letters

The Altai-kizhi dialectal group presents in this dictionary the group of the Altai people that speak both the Altain and the Russian literary languages. The associative dictionary is compiled in the Altai and Russian languages to reveal the specific features of speech activity of Russian and Altai people on the territory of the Republic of Altai.

The Altai bilingual people that defined themselves their high level of spoken Russian and Altai languages took part in our experiment. The group of the Altai monolingual people is selected conventionally, because nowadays there are no Altai people who can’t speak Russian. The basic criterion of this group is the ability to understand and fill in the questionnaire in the Altai literary language.

The associative dictionary includes 105 words-stimuli that were got as a of the opinion poll. Every person was offered to name the important concepts in his/her life. Words-stimuli make several associative semantic groups, such as: family relations, natural phenomena, ethnical norms, social relations, professional relations, emotions, etc. 920 reactions were got on each Altai word-stimulus in the process of the associative experiment. 1849 reactions on each Russian word-stimulus (972 reactions of Russian people and 877 – of Altai people).

Different social-aged group took part in the experiment: schoolchildren, students, people with high education, etc.

Each entry consists of the words-stimulus and associative reactions in decreasing frequency. Reactions with equal frequency are presented alphabetically. At the end of the entry the general quantity of reactions, the quantity of different reactions and refusing reactions are presented.