Podlachian language

Podlachian language (pudlaśka mova) is an East Slavic literary microlanguage based on the East Slavic dialects spoken by inhabitants of the southern part of Podlachian Province (Polish: województwo podlaskie) in Poland between the Narew (north) and Bug (south) rivers. The native speakers of these dialects usually refer to them by the adverbial term po-svojomu (in our own language). The unequivocal academic classification of the po-svojomu dialects has been disputed for many years among linguists as well as activists of ethnic minorities in Podlachia (Polish: Podlasie), who classify them as either Belarusian dialects with Ukrainian traits or Ukrainian dialects. The East Slavic dialects of Podlachia between the Narew and Bug rivers are perceived differently by their native speakers. According to an estimate made by Jan Maksymiuk, the author of a Podlachian language standardization project, on the basis of the 2002 census in Poland, some 32,000 people in Podlachia, who declared Belarusian ethnicity, identified these dialects as Belarusian ones. At the same time, about 1.5 thousand speakers opting for Ukrainian ethnic origin described the same dialects as Ukrainian. Jan Maksymiuk, who was born in Podlachia and identifies himself as an ethnic Belarusian, considers them a dialectal periphery of the Ukrainian language. He also claims that the Podlachian language standard proposed by him is “lexically, phonologically and morphologically more distant from the Ukrainian literary standard than, for example, the Lemko language in Poland or the Rusyn language in Slovakia”. The term Podlachian language (pudlaśka mova) as the name for a standardized written language based on the East Slavic dialects between the Narew and Bug rivers was used for the first time by Jan Maksymiuk in the April 2005 issue of the monthly magazine Czasopis. Earlier, in the February issue of Czasopis Jan Maksymiuk announced that he would use a modified Latin alphabet for his Podlachian writing system.