ZMIANY W SŁOWNICTWIE MIESZKAŃCÓW POWIATU GRUDZIĄDZKIEGO
THE CHANGES IN THE LEXIS OF THE GRUDZIĄDZ REGION’S INHABITANTS

Summary/Abstract: The object of the article is to deliberate on the specificity of vocabulary used by the people living in the region of Grudziądz and the changes that it has gone through in the past sixty years. The author, who comes from Grudziądz himself, set as a basis for the analysis the vocabulary used among family members and relatives. He selected 307 lexical items to be then verified by the means of a questionnaire in a written and oral form among 88 respondents (60 secondary school students, 20 adults from the region of Grudziądz and 8 people from areas adjacent to the region researched). The lexicon created and verified for the questionnaire is a conglomerate of words and phrases characteristic of folk and city dialect, slang and German language. There are particularly clear traces of adapting and modifying technical and everyday words from the German language. The city’s long military and penitentiary tradition also had a significant influence on the development of the after-war language of the inhabitants of Grudziądz and its surroundings. The subject of the analysis was the life-span of the 307 lexical items among representatives of two generations (age groups of 35 to 70 and 15 to 16). The result has shown that representatives of the older generation know and/or use 76.99 per cent of the items listed in the questionnaire while respondents from the younger age group know and/or use only 40.44 per cent out of the total lexis presented in the questionnaire.

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