GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF FOREIGN WORDS IN THE BULGARIAN AND POLISH DIALECTS IN COMPARISON WITH THE LITERARY LANGUAGE

Abstract

The purpose of the following study is to find and demonstrate the similarities between the Polish and Bulgarian dialects’ reactions to foreign vocabulary. It looks at language both through sociolinguistic and dialectological point of view, proving that in Bulgaria’s and Poland’s case dialects are less conscious and in some ways more predisposed to accepting loanwords than literary language, which develops in much more self-aware ways and can also take a lot of loan words into consideration, but also keeps it under control. Furthermore, the article presents several civilization factors, such as modernization and economic industrialization, which ultimately determine many aspects of the national languages’ future. Some public figures from the nineteenth century are what we call purists, and their negative reaction to influence from foreign languages is partially what made some areas of modern-day Bulgarian and Polish language loanword-free. The tables in the article’s second half are the empirical examples that prove how these societal tendencies resulted in both modern national literary languages having many fewer loanwords from neighboring nations than their naturally evolving dialectal counterparts. Even though Bulgarian and Polish are in some ways the most “apart” from each other of any two modern Slavic languages that have their own country and literary version, this particular abstract part of their behaviour towards the most influential neighboring language after the end of the nineteenth century is very similar.