Testimony to a Vanishing Heritage : The Polish Language in Bukovina

The book documents the spoken Polish of oldest Bukovina inhabitants – a geographical and historical region on the border of Ukraine and Romania. The spoken Polish in Bukovina is a dying heritage that holds a unique value for the Polish culture. It constitutes a conglomeration of local varieties of Polish, whose speakers arrived in waves from remote regions to an area that never belonged to the Polish state. These dialects then grew in long-term isolation from other versions of the Polish language while being surrounded by languages from three other groups: Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. The book provides numerous examples of the use of spoken Polish. The method used in the study – language as a guide to the experienced world – provides an insight into the world of Bukovina inhabitants, allowing readers to learn about the linguistic phenomena and sociocultural processes that underlie the everyday functioning of multilingual and multicultural social communities.