Współistnienie języków na ziemiach byłego Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego w świetle prac Jana Karłowicza
Co-existence of languages in the area of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the light of the works of Jan Karłowicz

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the issues of the co-existence of languages in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the consequences of the phenomenon as documented in the works of Jan Karłowicz – the outstanding scholar of the second half of the nineteenth century, an expert and researcher of the “Lithuanian” version of Polish language. The article emphasizes the fact that the research on languages in the area of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and results of their co-existence goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century and Jan Karłowicz was the pioneer of this research. He was the first to observe the following phenomena of their co-existence: interference; bilingualism and multilingualism; prioritization of co-existing languages with the unique role of the Polish language in focusing various functions in the history of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the diversity of Polish with sociolinguistic classification of its provincia­lisms and their division in the view of their origin; and the dangers to the Polish language in the period of Russification. Karłowicz struggled with the lack of terminology to describe the linguistic phenomena characteristic for the area. The article focuses on the classification of provincial qualities of the “Lithuanian” Polish language executed by Karłowicz in the social and ethnolinguistic area; and on the presentation of the phenomenon of linguistic interference visible in the provincial vocabulary in The Grand Duchy of Lithuania collected in “Dictionary of Polish dialects” by Karłowicz.

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