POLISH LANGUAGE IN REZEKNE TODAY. PHONETICS

According to Population Census 2011, the estimated number of Poles in Latgale was 20,806 (7%). In the city of Rēzekne there were 795 Poles (2.5%) who constituted the third largest national minority after Latvians and Russians (CSP 2012). The Polish language spoken in Latvia belongs to the Northern-Peripheral Polish (in Polish ‘polszcszyzna północnokresowa’) that functions on the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Ананьева 2004: 103). The aim of the paper is to describe and to analyse the major phonetic peculiarities of the Polish regiolect used by the Poles living in Rēzekne, determining their origin and possible infl uence of Russian and Latvian languages. The author juxtaposes the acquired data with the Standard Polish Language and fi ndings of other researchers considering Peripheral Polish Language. The material for this article has been recorded with a sound recorder at the end of 2011 and at the beginning of 2012 in Rēzekne during structured interviews. The length of the analysed records is 18 hours, which contain speech of thirty informants – three age groups of Poles born from 1932 to 1999 and living in Rēzekne. The data gained during interviews are indicative that since the Second World War there has been a signifi cant decrease in the use of Polish language in all spheres of life. Today the oldest and the middle generation use Peripheral Polish in families and at social events, but the youngest generation learns Standard Polish at school. A very signifi cant and interesting fact is that the representatives of the oldest generation who used and still use the Russian language to communicate with their children (the middle generation born during the Soviet rule), and use Polish when speaking to their grandchildren. After the auditory analysis of the recorded material, the author has selected ten most common and interesting phonetic peculiarities that are characteristic to the speech of Poles in Rēzekne. 1. Considering prosody, in the majority of idiolects the stress falls on the ...