The South-Eastern border of the Polish language

Starting from Porphyrogennetos, historical sources document the contacts of Lendians/Lachs/Poles with Ruthenians, the ancestors of the Ukrainians (instances of displacement and of settlement-related expansion), which is attested by the mutual borrowings and the Polish-Ruthenian grapholect in the 14th–16th century, and after the Union of Lublin – the Polish settlements in the Ukrainian lands of the Rzeczpospolita. A mark of the Mazowsze settlements, which date back to the Middle Ages, is represented by the term “Mazurzy” that is used to refer to the residents of peasant villages (even though the majority of their dialectal features and the historical data indicate the Małopolska region), whereas the language and the customs of the villages of noblemen is more closely related to the general Polish language. Both the former and the latter manifest Ukrainian influence, which apart from borrowings and calques preserves archaic terms. Apart from common features, the South-East borderland dialects manifest a territorial variety: (1) The Polonisation of Red Ruthenia, especially of cities (Lwów, Przemyśl, Drohobycz), began already in the Middle Ages. (2) In the 16th–17th century the Polish language expanded in Volhynia, (3) in Podolia, (4) in Kiev and in the Dnieper region, and (5) in the 18th–19th century – in Bukovina and Moldova. An indirect testimony of Polish settlement is furnished by the network of Roman Catholic parishes i.e. the “polska (lacka) wiara”.Akademia Polonijna w Częstochowie115