Ukształtowani przez historię: Polacy na dawnych Kresach Północno-Wschodnich i Łotwie w ocenie własnej (poglądy, status społeczny, atrybuty polskości, rola wyznania, sąsiedzi, losy)

• Academia: knygos tekstas

ENThis book consists of three parts. Part One provides an introduction to the issues in focus, including information about the areas of Polish settlement in the Kresy, the eastern regions of the historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and about the impact of the process on the native local population: Polonisation and the adoption of the Polish language. Part Two, the key part of the volume, presents a selection of passages from interviews with Poles from the geographical area under consideration. The informants talk about historical events which had a profound impact on their lives, and voice their opinions on a number of issues, including the role of the Roman Catholic Church, social differences (the gentry vs the peasantry), the process of de-Polonisation and its reasons, as well as tolerance on the one hand, and religious and etnic animosities on the other. From the Partitions (in the late eighteenth century), the eastern regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth experienced changes of political borders several times and belonged to different political entities: the Russian Empire, independent Poland, the national republics of the Soviet Union; as it is today, they are part of independent Lithuania and Latvia (members of the European Union), and quasi-independent Belarus under Aliaksandr Lukashenka (supported by Moscow). Each of those changes on the political map left an imprint on the mindset of the inhabitants of the area, both native and immigrant.Part Three offers an overview of language features of North Borderland Polish (polszczyzna północnokresowa). Although it is aimed at non-linguistic readership (historians, sociologists, psychologists and scholars in other fields), it may also be useful to those linguists who do not specialise in dialectology. In this part, the reader will find a list of features common to the speech of local Poles in the entire area of North Borderland Polish. Slight differences between particular ethnic territories (Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia), which stem from the influence of respective languages, do not undermine the essential uniformity of this variety of Polish. In order to help the reader, the book also includes extensive appendices. The first of them is a glossary of borrowings and regionalisms which might be difficult to understand (582 entries). Appendix 2 lists the names of towns, villages and areas, and provides their explanations in geographical terms (230 entries). Appendix 3, in turn, is a glosary of the Latvian variety of Polish (based on interviews with the Polish rural population in the district of Madona, 705 entries). The final appendix provides two lists of publications on the North Borderland variety of Polish: works by scholars affiliated with the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and works by linguists from other reseach and academic centres. Keywords: Borderland Polish (polszczyzna kresowa); dialectology; historical North-Eastern Borderland.

• Sociologija / Sociology
• Kalbotyra / Linguistics