Język rusiński we współczesnym krajobrazie językowym Dolnego Śląska
The Rusyn language in the contemporary linguistic landscape of Lower Silesia

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to examine the presence of Rusyn in the current linguistic landscape of the Lower Silesia region. Rusyn is the native language of Lemko, an East Slavic ethnic group that at first inhabited the Polish-Ukrainian-Slovak borderlands in the Carpathians. Various political events have repeatedly provoked migrations of Rusyn people. Today there are Rusyn settlements in many regions and cities in Europe and North America. In Central Europe, the most important include Ruski Krstur in the Serbian Vojvodina, Ştiuca in the Romanian Banat, small villages in northeastern Hungary, around the Slovakian Prešov and Ukrainian Užhorod as well as many places in Poland. In both Vojvodina and Slovakia, the institutional and political situation of the Rusyn language community is the most favorable, which results in a relatively rich presence of the language in public spaces even within their settlements. The current presence of Rusyn-speaking Lemkos in Lower Silesia is primarily the result of an expulsion campaign from 1947. On the one hand, they live in larger centers such as Wrocław or Legnica, where they cannot form closed groups, and on the other hand in small villages in the west-northern part of the region, where they are the absolute majority of residents in villages like Patoka or Michałów. However, the presence of the Rusyn language in the public spaces of the local linguistic landscape is very limited, which is determined by several sociolinguistic factors. The cemeteries in Modła and Zimna Woda occupy a special place in this landscape, where not only Rusyn lexis is manifested in the grave inscriptions, but also orthographic instabilities and hybrid forms that illustrate the Rusinian-Polish or Rusinian-Ukrainian language contact can be recognized.

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