„Ratuję od zupełnego unicestwienia ślady naszej przeszłości, które zacierają się, nikną z dniem każdym”

Abstract

“I AM SAVING THE REMAINS OF OUR PAST, WHICH FADE AND DISAPPEAR WITH EACH PASSING DAY, FROM COMPLETE DESTRUCTION”: VANDALIN SHUKEVICH’S MANUSCRIPTS AS A NOVEL SOURCE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE CONTACTS AT THE BALTO-SLAVIC BORDERLAND The paper is a pilot publication of a project on language contacts in a poorly studied area of the Baltic-Slavic border. The author presents the specifics of the egodocuments of Vandalin Shukevich (1852–1919), an autodidact scientist from the Nacha of the Lida district. The egodocuments were identified in the national historical archive of the Republic of Lithuania in 2021. The author presents their research potential in the study of linguistic contacts in the peripheral dialectal area of the Balto-Slavic border. She proves that the analysis of the dialectal material extracted from the manuscripts will introduce new knowledge about historical multilingualism, the Balto-Slavic language contacts, the development of local dialects, the state of the north-eastern Polish language at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and about the history of the Polish science. The results of the analysis will also be relevant for the present, introducing novel data on geolects and the dynamics of the development of cross-border language contacts in the poorly studied area of the Balto-Slavic borderland.