Unofficial surnames used by the Lithuanian minority in Poland: The linguistic and cultural heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian borderland

Unofficial surnames are rare because surnames today are generally official in character. However, in the case of Polish citizens who are Lithuanians, they are a phenomenon that has long been present, although visible mostly – and until the entry into force of the Act on National Minorities (2005) predominantly – in intra-group communication. Considering that until recently it was not possible to register the Lithuanian forms of surnames and use them officially, this anthroponymic cultural heritage has long been transmitted between generations only informally. On the basis of the analysis of approximately 330 pairs of surnames extracted from telephone directories covering the area of compact residence of the Lithuanian minority (two of them in Polish, and one – in Lithuanian), the article discusses from the socioonomastic point of view (cf. Ainiala, 2016) the phenomenon of parallel functioning among the members of the Lithuanian minority in Poland of two surname forms: an official Polish one and an unofficial Lithuanian one. The latter differs from the former graphically and morphonologically, and in almost 30 per cent of cases their match is not unambiguous (i.e. one Polish form corresponds to more than one Lithuanian form, and, conversely, one Lithuanian form – to two or even more forms in Polish). It should be emphasised that the presence of formal exponents of Lithuanianness (Lithuanian diacritics, inflectional endings, feminine suffixes) does not necessarily imply the Lithuanian etymology of the surname. The situation is additionally complicated by the fact that in everyday intra-group communication members of the Lithuanian minority in our country use not literary Lithuanian, in which they write their surnames in minority documents (such as Lithuanian minority periodicals Aušra, Suvalkietis, Šaltinis, Terra Jatwezenorum, or bilingual yearly school reports in the schools with Lithuanian as the language of instruction), but the dialect of the Dzuks, in which their surnames are pronounced. The picture is complemented by interviews conducted in early 2018 with about 40 members of this minority, and by contributions on the Internet forum of Lithuanians in Poland regarding their attitude to the official (re-)Lithuanisation of surnames. The former revealed the opinions of older respondents (over 40 years of age), and the latter – the views of younger people