Testimony to a Vanishing Heritage

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.

Helena Krasowska is Full Professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She studies the disappearing traces of Polish culture in Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova. Her research interests focus on national and linguistic minorities, linguistic biographies, cultural borderlands, social and individual memory.

Magdalena Pokrzyñska is an ethnologist and sociologist primarily focused on identity, social memory, heritage, traditionalism, folk culture, and borderland. She conducts interdisciplinary field research in Poland and abroad (Ukraine, Romania), cooperating with researchers from Germany, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine.

Olexiy Sukhomlynov’s main research interests include borderland and multicultural motifs in Polish literature, along with mechanisms of myths and stereotypes of collective and historical memory. He also studies Polish-Russian-Ukrainian relations.