The aim of the presented paper is to show the history of the development of research on social minorities in the environment of Bialystok sociologists. This research center, located on the north-eastern borderland of Poland, was one of the first in Poland to develop research in the field of borderland sociology. With time, the research subject has been expanded, from the analysis of the assimilation of the Belarusian minority to the contemporary face of the idea of a multicultural society, discussing not only nationality, religiosity, but also non-heteronormities.
An activist of two big traditions. Skaryna and Ukraine Scholarly research of Francysk Skaryna legacy has been initiated by J.V. Bacmejster in 1776 and V.S. Sopikow in 1813. Further research conducted in the XX century by Alexander Bilecki, Pavel Popov, Yaroslav Isayevich, U. Anichenko and contemporary studies of Halyna Kovalchuk, Alexandr Nauvov, Mariola Walczak-Mikolajczak and others demonstrate how important were Skaryna’s activities on the border of two big traditions. In this context it’s worth to focus on a topic “Skaryna and Ukraine” in all its depth: biographical, publishing, polygraphic, academic, bibliographical. Ukrainian episode in Skaryna’s life and his birth town of Polotsk is related to the cult of Saint Euphrosyne of Polotsk who established the fi rst female monastery and is considered a patron of female monasticism of Rus. Polygraphic context of Skaryna’s activities is tied to Western Europe. Upon the receipt of a doctorate in medicine at the University of Padua he visited Venice – one of the most prominent centers of printing and publishing including Slavic, Greek and Hebrew texts where he also mastered modern printing techniques. In Prague Skaryna used two color printing technique to publish The Song of Songs and print the title page of Biblia Ruska. In Vilnius two color printing technique has been applied to print fi ve chapters of the Bible and just one title page of Psalter.
The research task of the essay is to answer the question of what is the face of the nation in the ethnic enclaves situated at the peripheries of national states. The subject of the analyses is the local population of the village Jaworzynka. In 1922, the settlement Herczawa was founded as a local unit independent from Jaworzynka. Since then Herczawa began to belong to Czechoslovakia. The state-owned status of Jaworzynka, which started to be a part of the Republic of Poland, was recognized after the World War I. The author takes into account the longue durre of folk and national culture generated in the Silesian Beskidy in the second half of the 18th century. The national culture is the main term applied to the investigations of the borderland regions. According to the ethno-symbolic approaches (Anthony D. Smith) and culturalism methods in sociology (Antonina Kłoskowska), the author analyses in his research: 1) language, 2) religion, 3) folkways and mores 4) arts, 5) local knowledge and literature. These elements delineate the sphere of symbolic culture. Based on the common folk culture, two national cultures have been formed nowadays – the Polish and Czech ones. Both Polish and Czech Census Bureau data and objective elements of national culture discussed in the essay indicate the process of national revival. The local people of Jaworzynka identify themselves as Poles and the population of Herczawa define themselves as Czechs. The content and the form of the local culture are visible in Jaworzyna, but they seem to be latent or diminishing in Herczawa.
Teresa Willenborg’s book is devoted to analysis of the situation of the German population of former German territories which were granted to Poland in 1945 basing on diplomatic conferences of great powers: USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Willenborg focuses on experiences of Germans who decided to remain in their hometowns and villages. The subject of her interest is here mainly a term of becoming ‘foreign’ and ‘solitare’ in their own homeland after 1945. Thanks to usage of various Polish and German sources the author managed to stress the fact, that the history of post-war expulsions and national minorities often requires a transnational approach.
The article attempts to differentiate, on the basis of selected words recorded in the Polish-East Slavic borderland, whether we are dealing with language loans or old references. The analysis takes into account e.g. ethymological, morphological and geographical criteria. The study focuses on the following words: cot ‘an even number’, czapigi, czepigi ‘plough handle’, had ‘an abominable animal’ and hydzić się ‘loathe’, ‘abhor’, ‘denigrate’, kosiec ‘scyther’, liszka ‘an odd number’, liszny/liszni ‘superfluous’, ‘supernumerary’, przewiąsło ‘a straw belt to tie sheaths siewiec ‘sower’, śloza ‘tear’, żeniec ‘harvester’, żenich, żeniuch ‘bridegroom’, ‘fiancé’, żnieja ‘female harvester’. Recognition as borrowings may be based on those word forms where phonetic elements characteristic of other languages, unknown in Polish, occur. Analysis of certain words has revealed the occurrence of Proto-Slavic and all- -Slavic words, preserved in the Polish language as relics, in peripheral areas. In some cases, it is difficult to make clear-cut decisions, because, for example, the stem of the word is a continuation of the Proto-Slavic forms, to be found in the Polish language, while the derivatives are borrowings.
The author reviews the latest book by Leszek Bednarczuk devoted to the beginnings and the borderlands of the Polish language. The book under review deals with a wide array of topics related to the prehistory and history of Polish taken in its relation to Indo-European and the neighboring languages, the borderland varieties of Polish, and the linguistic vicissitudes of the Christianization of Poland.
In the last decades borderlands studies have been rapidly developing in various disciplines. Within the changing function of European borders (from separating line between two souvereign states to borderscapes of intercultural flows and fluid identity) the focus of border scholars moved towards social relations and bottom-up perspective. Thus, borderlands are perceived as laboratories of European integration and multicultural spaces. For the aim of this article, borderlands are defined as spaces located on the geographical border between different states, nations and cultures that are objects of European Union cohesion policy. By analysing the Eurobarometer survey on cross-border cooperation I try to demonstrate differences between border regions covered by the Interreg cross-border cooperation programmes in terms of cross-border practices, general trust in others and attitudes towards citizens of neighbouring countries.
This article attempts to examine and define the functions and character of the periodicals and other press publications of Polish Eastern Borderlands community functioning in the structures of the Polish war refugees and post-war political emigration in the West. The author presents the origins and the various phases of its history, including the phase of its inexorable decline. In a series of concise individual profiles the article covers all printed materials that can be classified as the press publications of the Polish Eastern Borderlands community.
The discussed and reviewed book may be considered not merely a collection of word studies, but also a monograph dealing with lexical language contacts in the Polish-Eastern Slavic linguistic borderland. The authors examine more than 30 dialect words against the background of imposing Polish and East Slavic linguistic material, utilise the extensive subject literature, and apply modern dialectological research and language contact theory methods. Their main academic achievements include a precise delineation of the extent of East Slavic lexical borrowings in Polish dialect and a convincing verification of the criteria used to determine them. These efforts also allowed them to discover relict Polish-East Slavic references, previously considered borrowings from Ruthenian languages, in the examined lexical material. The publication, due to its advantages in material, theory and methodology, should serve as a model of research on dialectal linguistic borderlands for Slavic language studies. I believe that the book of Dorota Krystyna Rembiszewska and Janusz Siatkowski should deserves to be rated highly.
The article deals with the question of linguistic interference among Slavic languages at the example of Choroszczynka, a bilingual village in Biała Podlaska County, Lublin Voivodeship. The presentation of two complete questionnaires for the Slavic Linguistic Atlas (OLA), Polish and Ukrainian, not only makes it possible to capture grammatical and lexical peculiarities of both sets assigned to individual dialects, but also reveals carelessness of the fi eldworkers who collected the data. This, in turn, contributed to such an interpretation of dialectal data presented in OLA maps which does not refl ect linguistic reality.
In the Hajnówka district, over 450 surnames with the suffix (derivational morp heme) -uk are recorded which were mostly formed from patronymics based on given names of Greek origin, less frequently of Hebrew, Latin and Slavic. The goal of the present article is to discuss patronymic surnames with the suffix -uk found exclusively in Poland or in largest numbers in the Hajnówka district in the Białystok region, which is overwhelmingly inhabited by the Orthodox population, who usually speak Belarusian, Ukrainian or sometimes mixed dialects. The material basis of the present study is therefore the surnames with the suffix -uk most characteristic of the area investigated and strictly associated with this territory from the time of its settlement.
The author set himself the following specific objectives: a) establish the number of people with a particular surname in Poland; b) establish the number of people with a particular surname in the Hajnówka district; c) establish the surnames with the suffix -uk found exclusively in Poland or in largest numbers in the Hajnówka district; d) establish the origin of the surname investigated. The article may prove useful not only in establishing the origin of the surnames studied but also in determining the place where they arose and the directions of migration of the population within Poland.