ZACHODNIOCIESZYŃSKIE SŁOWNICTWO GWAROWE – PRÓBA UJĘCIA TEMATU
West Cieszyn Silesia dialectal vocabulary – an attempt to grasp the topic

Summary/Abstract: This paper discusses specifi cally the language situation in the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia, where a few language codes are used in communication: the traditional West Cieszyn dialect, Czech – both colloquial and standard, and – among members of the Polish national minority – “scholastic” literary Polish. While describing the situation where such codes can overlap and mix, the author makes an attempt at a presentation of the universal processes shaping trans-dialectal variants which occur also in other multi-ethnic and multi-lingual regions. This concerns speaking “po našymu” (“our own language”), which can be affected by other language codes (a dialect, majority language, minority language) at any level of the linguistic system (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicology/phraseology). The author focuses on the lexical layer and discusses the question of what a dialect vocabulary actually is, which of its parts are usually included in dialect dictionaries (lexicons), how dialect users actually speak when they do not use the “pure” dialect, etc. The author presents her theses on the basis of a language material contained in two – partly similar and partly different – dialect dictionaries.

• Details
• Contents