Polish Highlanders in Carpathian Bukovina:

1.  Objective and Scope of the Dissertation

The objective of this dissertation is to provide a linguistic description of the Polish dialect of Bukovina Highlanders living within the historical-geographical land of Carpathian Bukovina. The paper is constructed according to the following objectives:

1. a) presentation of the history and social, national, and linguistic problems of the region;
2. b) description of the Bukovina Highlanders’ settlement and migration, and presentation of the studied villages;
3. c) presentation of the sociolinguistic situation of the multilingual Highlander community;
4. d) description of the Bukovina Highlanders’ Polish dialect’s functioning in different realms of communication;
5. e) lexical characterization of the dialectal material.

The core task in describing the Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect was choosing the base material. I decided to describe the language of the people living in six villages which, since 1944, belong to two different countries, namely – three villages in today’s Ukraine (Stara Huta, Nyzhni Petrivtsi, and Terebleche) and three villages in today’s Romania (Poiana Micului, Solonețu Nou, and Pleșa). All the villages are multilingual. Various factors affect the code-switching behaviors of Polish villagers, the roles language plays across distinct settings, and the condition of the vocabulary in use. This analysis pertains specifically to multilingual individuals, taking into consideration:

1. 1) two Slavic systems – common Polish language and a dialect, Polish and Russian, Polish and Ukrainian;
2. 2) two language systems: Slavic and non-Slavic – Polish and German, Polish and Romanian.

The observed instances of linguistic interference within the dialect suggest a significant degree of interaction with the languages with which it has historically and continues to engage. The multilingual proficiency of the Bukovina Highlanders in Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian facilitates ongoing linguistic exchange. The application of these languages is intertwined with the context of the situation, the identity of the conversational partner, and the location of the discourse. In each of the studied villages, I paid particular attention to the Polish dialect’s situation and function in selected spheres of communication: family, neighborhood, school, church, and administration.

I base the lexical characteristics of the dialectal material on a specific set of vocabulary that I obtained through querying individual informers and completing the questionnaire from the Ogólnokarpacki Atlas Dialektologiczny. I collected the lexical material and assessed the sociolinguistic situation of Polish Highlanders’ dialect in Bukovina after twenty years, first in 2002, and then in 2022.

I divided the lexical material into five thematic groups relating to people:

1. 1. People and their features.
2. 2. People at home.
3. 3. People at work.
4. 4. Social and spiritual culture.
5. 5. People’s environment.

The comparative analysis of the given vocabulary is mainly concerned with differentiating between the native words and the borrowings. The basis for the comparison is the common Polish language. The groups that stand out particularly are the so-called carpathisms and the words from Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect that geographically encompass also the Subcarpathia, southern Silesia, and the Čadca region. Moreover, Ukrainian and Romanian borrowings that the Highlanders adopted after settling in Bukovina are a separate group.

Bukovina Highlanders’ common Polish language also presents the features of the language of the south-eastern Borderlands. The reasons why the Bukovina Highlanders’ language adopted the southern-Borderlands features are well-known facts, like those that E. Biedrzycki provides: “When Bukovina became part of Galicia, the Bukovina schools got under the Lviv schooling’s supervision. We also know that Lviv consistory sent teachers who speak German and Polish to Bukovina.”¹ Teachers and priests who studied in Lviv or came from around Lviv were sent to work in the Highlanders’ villages. This group included Daniel Mielnik, a teacher born in Stryjski Powiat, Władysław Lewandowski, a priest who studied in Lviv, and probably others.

However, the Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect’s significant conservatism stems from the fact that the villages of Poiana Micului, Solonețu Nou, Pleșa, Stara Huta, Nyzhni Petrivtsi, and Terebleche are located relatively far from large cities and have little contact with the other Poles. This is especially true for the mountain villages in today’s Romania. The separateness and preservation of the old dialect, including its lexis, was also connected to the occupations of the people living in the villages I studied and the ethnic composition of each village as well as the general composition of the group.

The lexis I collected in the selected villages are only answers to the questionnaire from Ogólnopolski Atlas Dialektologiczny. Therefore, it does not represent the Bukovina Highlanders’ complete vocabulary, but a part of it. I applied the above-described research objectives as I repeated my field research in the same villages after twenty years.

The comparison of the lexis used in both countries is meant to demonstrate and document the similarities and differences in lexis, to retrace the history of the Polish words that survived the Bukovina Highlanders’ migrations in their dialect, and to show the degree to which they adapted the lexis they encountered in Bukovina.

3.  State of Research on the Polish Dialects in Bukovina

The literature on Polish dialects in Bukovina is scarce, and since the publication of the book in 2006, several important publications that I will take into consideration appeared. At the session of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Language Committee on March 16, 1938, Mieczysław Małecki and Gregor Nandriș presented a report from a 1938 voyage to Bukovina and the results of preliminary dialectological research.²³ Małecki and Nandriș’s intention was to continue their research and extend it to all Polish communities in Romania. Their work was set to result in a detailed description of Polish dialects in Romania, based on dialectal material composed of prose, song lyrics, and a possibly extensive vocabulary.²⁴ Here I should note that:

1. 1) it was the first article to describe the Polish dialect in Bukovina;
2. 2) since 1940, the entire Bukovina was part of the Kingdom of Romania, therefore the study would encompass the Polish dialects from throughout Bukovina;
3. 3) the preliminary report was concerned only with the locations inhabited by Highlanders who arrived from the Čadca region, which is today part of Romania. The report did not comprise Stara Huta, Nyzhni Petrivtsi, and Terebleche, which are part of today’s Ukraine.

In the pilot, first paper about the Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect, the authors pay particular attention to the linguistic features that distinguish Polish from Slovak, because such an approach is best for determining whether and to what degree Slovak really influenced the dialects. The authors, as they list some of the dialect’s proper features, emphasize “that the discussed subdialects phonetically present a definitely Polish character, and strongly differ from Slovakian.”²⁵ In the conclusion of the report, the authors pay particular attention to the fact that “linguistic features, both grammatical and especially lexicographical, fully confirm the origin of a given subdialect; if not exclusively, at least in the vast majority of the Bucovinian Poles must have roots in the Čadca region.”²⁶

In his book Język polski na południe od Karpat (Spisz, Orawa, Czadeckie, wyspy językowe)²⁷ (Polish Language South of the Carpathians – Spisz, Orawa, Čadca region, language islands) M. Małecki writes about the language of the Highlanders from the Čadca region, and mentions the Čadca dialects in Romanian Bukovina. Małecki states that “the Highlanders from the Čadca region – who settled there at the beginning of the last century, in villages like Poiana Micului, Pleșa, or Solonețu Nou – use the Čadca subdialect, related most to the Oščadnica type.”²⁸

Mieczysław Małecki was the first to present the dialect’s state as it was at that time, when the Highlanders have lived in a multicultural and multilingual environment for 135 years. The war interrupted Małecki’s research and made the description of the research results impossible.

In 1944, Bukovina was divided into southern Bukovina which became part of Romania, and northern Bukovina, which belonged to the Soviet Union, and today is part of Ukraine.

In the 1960s, scholars from different countries became interested in the dialects of southern Bukovina. Here I wish to refer to E. Vrabie’s paper²⁹ where he lists all the villages where Poles, according to the census, constitute a large percent of the inhabitants, and therefore their dialect can be subject to study. The same issue includes I. C. Chiţimia and E. Deboveanu’s paper³⁰ containing rich linguistic and ethnographic material, together with dialectal texts. Two years later, I. C. Chiţimia published another article.³¹

E. Deboveanu and S. Gogolewski’s paper published in the 1960s is also a significant publication of Polish language studies. The authors executed a detailed linguistic analysis of Polish dialects in today’s Romania. Deboveanu and Gogolewski presented the results of their years-long research on the dialects in all the villages of Romanian Bukovina in the publication Przegląd gwar polskich na terenie Rumunii³² (An Overview of Polish Dialects in Romania).

E. Deboveanu’s monograph Polska gwara Górali bukowińskich w Rumunii³³ (Bukovina Highlanders’ Polish Dialect in Romania) is one of the first papers to include a detailed description and specific characteristics of the Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect in Romania. In the monograph, Deboveanu describes the language of Poles living in three villages of the Suceava county: Solonețu Nou, Pleșa, and Poiana Micului. The author analyses in detail the phonetical and inflectional systems of the studied dialect and compares them to the systems of the common Polish language and other Polish dialects. The monograph consists of two parts:

1. 1) a synchronous analysis of the phonological and inflectional systems;
2. 2) a diachronic description of the phonological and inflectional systems.

E. Deboveanu presents facts that confirm the Polishness of the dialect, discusses the features that the dialect preserved from the period where it developed together with the Polish language, and the features that accumulated in the years of contact with the Slovak language, and later also German, Romanian, and Ukrainian. Meanwhile, in his monograph, S. Gogolewski³⁴ characterizes the specific properties of the language of Poles living in Cacica, a trilingual village in Romania. The fact that the Highlanders alternated between three languages caused changes in the system of their own dialect. Based on the conducted research, Gogolewski characterizes the structure of the phonological and inflectional systems of the Polish dialect in the village of Cacica.

The interest in the language of the Bukovina Poles eased for some time, and it was not until the early 1990s that S. Gogolewski³⁵ referred to the earlier works and wrote comments on the linguistic interferences in the insular Polish dialects in Romanian Bukovina.

K. Feleszko traveled Bukovina (both northern and southern) and followed the language of the Bukovina resettlers in Poland. In the 1990s, Feleszko wrote several papers and a monograph on the Bukovina Poles’ language. We should pay particular attention to his paper “‘Rumuni’ czy ‘Słowacy’? Czyli droga Górali bukowińskich nad Gwdę”³⁶ (“Romanians” or “Slovaks?”: The Bukovina Highlanders’ Journey to Gwda). In the paper Feleszko states that the “young generation of Bukovina Highlanders in Poland blends with others in the melting pot of the Westlands, and the land of Čadca is already fundamentally ‘Slovakized.’ The source of authenticity is still active only in Bukovina.”³⁷ In his writing, Feleszko adds sociolinguistic studies to the problems of Polish dialects in Bukovina. We can also find information on the Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect, their migrations and settlement in the mountains in Tożsamość językowa, czyli: kto zasiedlił kilka wiosek Bukowiny?³⁸ (Linguistic Identity: Who Settled Several of Bukovina’s Villages?). We should also consider K. Feleszko’s paper “Dalekie pogranicze: dialog polsko-słowacki na Bukowinie”³⁹ (Distant Borderlands: The Polish-Slovak Dialogue in Bukovina), where Feleszko emphasizes the small number of typically southern-Silesian and northern-Slovak traits in the Bukovina Highlanders’ lexis, where Bukovinian and Carpathian traits dominate, together with the traits proper exclusively to the given dialect. In the realm of Carpathian culture’s linguistic correlates, the dialect, in its primary variation, is proper, Bukovinian, and Carpathian.

Four volumes of articles from scientific conferences dedicated to Bukovina, edited by K. Feleszko,⁴⁰ present a broad overview of different authors’ interest in this region and in the Poles that live there among other nations. The first volume of Feleszko’s Bukowina moja miłość (Bukovina, my Love)⁴¹ includes papers about multilingualism and national identity, the contact between Polish and German as insular languages (on the example of Bukovina before 1939) and a paper about the description methods for an extinct Polish dialect outside of Poland. The volume also includes elements of K. Feleszko’s biography and a list of his academic papers. The second volume of K. Feleszko’s work⁴² includes the Słownik polszczyzny bukowińskiej do 1945 roku (Dictionary of Bukovina Polish Before 1945) preceded by a linguistic characteristic of Bukovina Polish.⁴³

M. Ostrovschi from Solonețu Nou conducted detailed research on the Bukovina Highlanders’ dialect in Romania. Ostrovschi defended her doctoral thesis about Bukovina Highlanders’ noun and adjective formation in Romania,⁴⁴ which she wrote under S. Gogolewski’s supervision. Currently, H. Krasowska studies the Polish dialect in Ukrainian Bukovina.⁴⁵

In the above-listed works, E. Deboveanu and S. Gogolewski divided Polish community in Romania into four groups that varied in language and origin:

1. 1) the community and language of the Cacica village;
2. 2) the so-called Bukovinian Highlanders and their dialect;
3. 3) the community and dialect of the Ruda village in southern Bukovina;
4. 4) the community and dialect of Bulai and Michoweny⁴⁶ villages in Romania.

After the publication of the monograph in 2006,⁴⁷ I also published several important papers in Polish. The object of this monograph is the description of the language of a small group of over two thousand Poles living in the Carpathians, around the border between today’s Ukraine and Romania. The characteristics of the studied minority’s language were described with consideration for its function, spheres, and domains of usage, code-switching in multilingual situations, interferences with the relevant languages and dialects, and the influence of the changing state policy. The complicated history and migrations, changing borders and state government, and consequently – changing policies towards the Polish group, the Romanian and Ukrainian substrates, the German, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Russian adstrata – all these factors make the language of the Polish-identifying group of Highlanders’ language from the south of Poland a particularly complex research object. The characteristics primarily isolate the Polish lexis and the lexis of Ukrainian or Romanian origin. Each of the two large groups is also internally complex: the Polish vocabulary includes a certain number of words from common (literary) Polish, devoid of dialectal traits, a number of words with dialectal traits, and a number of words with visible traits of the southern-Borderlands Polish; there are also local semantic innovations. The second group includes the “Carpathian” lexis common to the local Ukrainian and Romanian dialects, mutual Romanian-Ukrainian borrowings the origin of which is difficult to determine (the so-called lexical parallels), and words adopted from Balkan, Turkish, and Arabic languages, as well as other migratory borrowings. I write about the problems of Polish vocabulary and its analysis in the papers “Problem słownictwa w polskiej gwarze górali bukowińskich”⁴⁸ (The Problem of Vocabulary in Bukovina Highlanders’ Polish Dialect) and “Losy wybranych leksemów w polskiej gwarze górali bukowińskich”⁴⁹ (The History of Selected Lexemes in Bukovina Highlanders’ Polish Dialect).

Among bigger publications on the subject, we should list the Słownik górali polskich na Bukowinie⁵⁰ (The Dictionary of Polish Highlanders in Bukovina). The book contains an extensive (several thousands of entries) collection of the Polish Highlanders’ vocabulary. I also wish to emphasize the original value of the collected and analyzed material, as it consists of facts obtained from the still-living informers who may remember the interwar period as well as the times after that. Słownik is the first serious publication concerned with the vocabulary of this Polish ethnographical and linguistic group, which is for many reasons peculiar. Because of its scientific technique and interdisciplinary approach to cultural phenomena, the book is an extremely valuable, ambitious, and successful publication.

When studying the lexical and sociolinguistic problems of Poles in Bukovina, we should note Helena Krasowska’s articles, which appear in different publications: “O pewnej specyfice słownictwa polskich górali na Bukowinie”⁵¹ (On the Specifics of Polish Highlanders’ Vocabulary in Bukovina), “Język Polaków na Bukowinie Karpackiej”⁵² (The Language of Poles in Carpathian Bukovina), “Czy istnieje język bukowiński?”⁵³ (Is There a Bukovinian Language?), “Tradycje Bożego Narodzenia u Polaków w Pance – dawniej i dziś”⁵⁴ (Christmas Traditions of Poles in Panka: Then and Now), “Problematyka pożyczek słowackich w polskiej gwarze górali bukowińskich”⁵⁵ (The Problems of Slovak Borrowings in the Polish Dialect of Bukovina Highlanders), “Współczesna sytuacja polszczyzny na Bukowinie Karpackiej”⁵⁶ (The Current Situation of the Polish Language in Carpathian Bukovina).

I dedicate more attention to the monographs published in 2018 and 2022. The monograph Świadectwo zanikającego dziedzictwa. Mowa polska na Bukowinie: Rumunia-Ukraina⁵⁷ (The Testimony to a Disappearing Heritage; Polish Speech in Bukovina: Romania-Ukraine) is a unique work that presents the results of the research that a group of researchers conducted in all the villages in Bukovina where Poles live in the years 2015–2018. In the linguistic aspect, I divided Polish language in Bukovina into: