The Current State of the Polish Language Spoken in Kraslava.

The aim of the present paper is to describe and analyse the major peculiarities of the Polish language used by Poles living in Kraslava. The Polish language preserved and spoken by the local community belongs to the Northern-Peripheral Polish (polszcszyzna pólnocnokresowa) that functions on the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Over time the regiolect that due to political and historical events has been parted from the Standard Polish has developed a number of traces that differentiate it from the standard variety of the language. The material has been recorded in the spring of 2012 during structured interviews with twenty-two Poles currently living in Kraslava. The auditory analysis of the recorded material allowed for determining such phonetic traces as: the stress on the ultimate and antepenultimate syllables; the coexistence of the characteristic Standard Polish semi-vowel u and Polish Peripheral dental lateral approximant l; synchronous and asynchronous pronunciation, as well as denasalization of "nasal vowels" <p5 §; so called "singing pronunciation"; reduction of unstressed vowel e > i, y. A common phonetic process akanie - the merging of unstressed vowels o, e into a, causes such morphological peculiarities as the change of gender from neuter to feminine or equation of Accusative and Nominative cases in feminine nouns. In morphology interesting is also the use of masculine endings in the past tense plural in combination with masculine and non-masculine nouns or pronouns; the absence of the reflective pronoun si§ in reflexive verbs or addition of the particle si§ to non-reflexive verbs. Innovative is also the use of borrowings and calques. The most frequent recorded syntactic peculiarities are: the use of auxiliary trzeba; the use of construction u + Genitive; the use of argument cases that are not characteristic of the Standard Polish; and changes in the use of prepositions as post-positives. The material gathered during the current research allows determining that the Polish language used in Kraslava today shows historical and current influence of Russian, Belorussian, and Latvian languages. It can be concluded that the Polish language spoken by Poles in Kraslava today is an aggregate of idiolects with many common linguistic peculiarities, and their frequency depends on the generation of the speakers and languages used on everyday basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]