Between the two great world wars the Polish Sector of the Belorussian Cultural Institute elaborated a linguistic monograph on the speech of the Poles in Belarus, published in 1932 in Minsk (the then Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic). Today, the publication constitutes the only document of the living language of the Poles inhabiting that area at that time. Scattered and scarce historical data enabled the authoress to present the motivation and circumstances leading to the production and publication of Czeslaw Dabrowski's original book. Despite that he was not a linguist, he succeeded in faithful description of the grammatical and lexical peculiarities of the 'Belarus' Polish language. Comparing the Dabrowski's work with a number of dictionaries and monographs on the Polish language spoken in the borderland (Kresy) area, the author proves that this exclusive and only language document constitutes an undeniable evidence of the presence of the Polish language and its real functioning as a means of communication for the Polish-originating society in the Soviet Belarus. The dialect that Czeslaw Dabrowski described was a part of the Polish language code in the Northern – Eastern borderland (Kresy) region. Its existence came to end when, in the period of the intensified terror of 1937-1939, most of the Polish population in the Soviet Belarus was physically liquidated.
Financed by the National Centre for Research and Development under grant No. SP/I/1/77065/10 by the strategic scientific research and experimental development program:
SYNAT - “Interdisciplinary System for Interactive Scientific and Scientific-Technical Information”.