International Journal of Philology

The article presents the phonetic and inflectional features of the Polish language spoken in the petty nobility village of Slobidka Rakhnivska in Podolia in comparison with other Polish dialects in Ukraine. Vast material for analysis comes from field research conducted in the village by Marta Gugała and Aleksandra Krawczyk-Wieczorek in 2003 and by myself in 2009 under the supervision of Professor Janusz Rieger. Local Poles experienced collectivization, famine in 1933 and 1947, arrests, shootings and deportations in 1935–38; some rescued themselves by declaring their nationality as Ukrainian. Such historic and sociolinguistic circumstances inevitably influenced the number of Poles in Slobidka and the use of Polish. Nowadays it is little spoken on a daily basis. The dominant language in use is Ukrainian, while Polish, however, remains a sacred language and a means of private communication with senior people.
The conducted analysis showed that due to close Polish and Ukrainian as well as Russian linguistic contacts foreign influences are noticeable on different linguistic levels: phonetic and inflectional. The word stress, however, remains fixed, on the penultimate syllable, even in borrowings. At the same time, the research confirmed earlier observations: Polish of the local descendants of the petty nobility is more similar to the regional variety of the standard Polish, spoken in the South-Eastern Borderlands and described by Zofia Kurzowa, than to other Polish peasant dialects in the neighboring territories. For example, there are no forms with realization of suffix ł/l > n in the words wzieła, wzioł, zdjoł; no realization -ił, -ył > -uł in the words bił, kupił; no dissimilation kk > tk like in letki, mientki or dl > gl in gliatego, glia and others. A separate issue for discussing and further analysis is features, known in Polish ethnic dialects, and characteristic of Ukrainian at the same time

Polish in Ukraine; petty nobility; peasant; dialect; linguistic contacts; phonetics; inflection