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The present paper consists of two parts, and presents the spoken Polish of the North-Eastern Borderland, as well as borrowings from Polish which function in the dialects of the Pskov province. Three regions with different histories have been included. The southern lands of the Pskov province (the area which belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772) were described in the first part of the article. The sociolinguistic situation and loanwords borrowed from Polish (or via Polish) were analysed basing on two sources: the author’s materials collected during dialectological field research, and material from The Pskov Regional Dictionary with Historical Data. The Pytalovo region (which belonged to Latvia in the interwar period) and the historical Pskov region (where there were no Polish settlements) were described in the second part of the paper. Two sources were used: The Pskov Regional Dictionary with Historical Data, and The Dialectological Dictionary of One Family (Pytalovo Region of the Pskov Province). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses Witold Mańczak’s hypothesis concerning a Finnic (particularly Balto-Finnic) substrate in the Baltic languages (Mańczak 1990: 29–38, 1993: 151, 2008: 149–152), as well as Jan Henrik Holst’s critical evaluation of the problem (Holst 2015: 151–173). Mańczak lists ten arguments in support of the substrate theory: According to Meillet (1925: 100–101), the disappearance of the neuter gender in Lithuanian and Latvian occurred under the influence of Balto-Finnic languages, since the category of gender is absent from Finno-Ugric. Old Lithuanian displays secondary local cases (i.e. illative, allative, adessive, inessive) formed using postpositions, following the Finno-Ugric pattern (Meillet 1925: 101). Lithuanian constructions expressing evidentiality (e.g. Lith. nešęs velnias akmenį ‘a devil is said to have brought a stone’) – as well as their Latvian counterparts – appeared due to substrate influence, according to Pisani (1959: 217). Lithuanian numerals 11–19 ending in -lika (e.g. Lith. vienúolika ‘eleven’, dvýlika ‘twelve’, etc.) are of substrate origin (ibid.: 217). Lithuanian imperative particle -ki or -k (e.g. OLith. dúoki ‘give’) reproduces a similar particle known from Finnish, according to some scholars (Toporov, Trubačev 1962: 249–250). The alternation of voiced and voiceless consonants, as in blekai/plekai ‘tripe’ (Kiparsky 1968: 76–90 lists 200 such doublets in Latvian and 50 in Lithuanian), may be caused by the influence of a Finno-Ugric substrate, since the Finno-Ugric languages used to lack voiced consonants. There are Common Baltic terms of Finno-Ugric origin, e.g. the name for ‘amber’: OPrus. gentars, Lith. giñtaras, Latv. dzĩtars m. ‘amber’ (Bednarczuk 1976: 47–48). The use of the genitive instead of an adjective in East Baltic (e.g. Lith. lietuvių kalba ‘Lithuanian language’, Latv. latviešu valoda ‘Latvian language’), unknown to other Indo-European languages, arose through Balto-Finnic influence – cf. Finnish suomen kieli ‘Finnish language’, Est. eesti keel ‘Estonian language’ (Bednarczuk 1968). The territory of Latvia abounds in hydronyms of Finnic provenance, while in Lithuania we may identify the name Nemunas (the main river in the area) as well as ca. 30 other river names of potential Finno-Ugric origin (Zinkevičius 1984: 155). The non-distinction of grammatical number in third-person finite verb forms in Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian was, according to some researchers (e.g. Thomason, Kaufman 1988: 243), caused by Balto-Finnic influence. Besides, the present author reviews Holst’s critical paper on the hypothesis about Uralic substrate in Common Baltic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]