The Warmia Dialect of the Village of Bredynki in Historical Dialectology

Abstract

The text focuses on the Warmia dialect of the village of Bredynki using data such as a 19th-century questionnaire for the German Language Atlas and field research records from the 1950s. The juxtaposition of historical dialectal data is rarely used in dialect studies, as there are not enough records showing the state of the local language from the same location at different periods of its development. The text identifies the phonetic features present in both sources. i.e. the absence of mazurization (denoted in different ways), the asynchronous pronunciation of soft labial consonants, the transition of -ar- into -er- and ja- into je-, a shift of articulation of y to back u in verb forms. Both texts feature the same words, characteristic for the region of Warmia (and the neighbouring areas), e.g. gbur ‘landlord’, kołacz ‘cake’, draszować ‘to thresh’. Records from the 1950s provide interesting lexical insights into many subject areas, e.g. flax processing, clothing and construction. A comparison of the two sets of dialectal data demonstrated the invariability of the Warmian dialect of one village over a number of decades. At the same time, the confrontation enables a retrospective view of dialectal phenomena.