The collection of articles is devoted to the description of the living language of a modern city on the material of speech recordings of residents of Moscow, Leningrad and some other cities. The specifics of the uncodified spheres of the modern Russian language are investigated, the problem of the linguistic status of urban vernacular is considered. In the works presented in the collection, vernacular is understood as a set of speech features of persons who do not fully own the norms of the literary language that does not have a systemic nature. Vernacular is found on different tiers of language reading, which determines its level-by-level analysis: vernacular phenomena in phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, lexical semantics are investigated.