The insular Polish dialects in Siberia

In this article, the features of two insular Polish dialects in Siberia are analyzed. The dialects continue old tribal dialects and have different initial systems: the Mazursky mother dialect in the villages Znamenka and Aleksandrovka near Abakhan and the Malopolsky one in the village Vershina near Irkutsk. The peculiarities of the above mentioned dialects caused by their origin include phonetic, morphological, morphonological, word-building and lexical ones. For example, typical words (borrowings included) originated from the mother dialects are the following: - in the dialect of the village Vershina Lesser Polish xab’ina “branch”, gaȝ́ina “cattle”, Slovakisms rusy “croaches”, modžyń “larch”, Germanisms buƞk “natural”, fest “firmly, fast” and others; - in the dialect of the village Znamenka Masovets words kokos “cock”, zabacać “to forget”, local Germanisms gruska “Granny”, gruzek “Grandpa”, brak “must”, šurek “boy”, rybak’i “potato pancakes” and others. Among the phonetic features there are, for example, the following: o as the continuation of *ā in the dialect of the village Vershina (jo - pronoun “I”, cytom “I read”) and a as the continuation of *ā and *ă in the dialect of Znamenka (ja - pronoun “I”, pomagam “I help”); i as the continuation of i and y in the dialect of Znamenka (sin “son”) and the functioning of both i and y in the dialect of the village Vershina (syn “son”); the functioning of s, z, c, ȝ instead of sz, ż, cz, dż in the dialect of the village Znamenka (duzo “many”, prose “I beg”, “please”, capka “cap”) and the functioning of only c instead of cz in the dialect of the village Vershina (copka “cap”, but dużo “many”), and others. The article also considers the results of the interaction of the given Polish dialects with the Russian language both in spoken and literary forms. Three consequences of the influence of the Russian language on the Siberian Polish dialects which have a universal character have been pointed out, naimely: 1) the loss of the indigenous word or word form and their substitution by another language (in this case the Russian one); for example, the loss of Polish names of the months in the both dialects compared and their substitution by the Russian equivalents, or the loss under the influence of the Russian language of the personal endings in the forms of the Past tense like ja pošet - literary “poszedłem”, my pošl’i - literary “poszliśmy”, and so on); 2) the increasing number of the isofunctional variations, for example, navet // daže, barȝo // očeń and the like; 3) the appearance of hybrid forms that combine elements of the contacting languages (in our case the Russian and Polish ones) in the frame of a single word form; for example, in the Russanism otv’eca “replies”. Polish phonetic (c instead of č) and morphological (the third personal singular ending of the Present tense verbs am-conjugation -a) peculiarities are represented.

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