Stigma versus the Value of a Language: The Situation of Polish Dialects in Romanian Bukovina

This article presents the current situation of users of local dialects of the Lesser Poland regional dialect of Polish (gwary malopolskie) in Romanian Bukovina. Owing to demographic processes as well as social and cultural conditions, their number continues to fall. The latest research indicates that in the case of several villages with the Polish population it is difficult to talk about local dialects anymore: they have been substituted with what can be more adequately referred to as "a group of idiolects". Such communities in Romanian Bukovina are composed of people whose ancestors originally came from the Lesser Poland region in Poland. By contrast, Bukovinian highlanders are the only group of Poles in Romania in which local dialect is still passed between generations. The article attempts to answer the question why only in this group the dialectal speech of their ancestors has remained a value, as apparent in its intergenerational transmission.