The paper focuses on the way dialect is perceived and studied in the present socio-economic conditions as well as civilization, cultural and moral conditions. The author presents hitherto achievements of dialectology and points to new directions and methods which enrich and expand its scope. She highlights interdisciplinary character of present-day dialectology and related to that adopting methods of other disciplines, in particular sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics.
New challenges facing dialectology concern interpretation of linguistic changes taking place in the present village, together with fusing the past and the present; moreover including the language in the cultural, social and civilization context, with dialects which not only document the passing age, but are lasting components of national heritage.
The aim of the paper is to discuss the research tasks and perspective facing the Polish dialectology in the situation when most dialect features are quickly disappearing and most dialects cease to be valid everyday communication code.
The most significant task must be building the Polish Dialect Corpus either as a separate language corpus or as a sub-corpus within existing, but still being developed the National Corpus of Polish as well as the Internet sound base of the Polish dialect texts „New Kolberg”. Other tasks concern filling the gaps in the Polish dialect lexicography.
Polish dialectology should use the chances offered by fashion for regionalism, but stay fully aware of connected with that possible threats, and by ratified recently by Poland UNESCO Convention on Protection of Nonmaterial Cultural Heritage, whose significant element is language, in particular its dialect and regional variations.
The intention of our paper is to indicate the place of dialectology in Polish language education and the impact of this education on the linguistic awareness and competence.
Presented situation disclosed devaluation of dialectology in the Polish studies, the process which has been particularly progressing since the turn of the 20th and 21st century.
This situation is a consequence, among other things, of the so-called educational reforms preferring mainly pragmalinguistics and glottodidactics which derive from trends in study of modern languages, and abandoning historical, diachronic linguistics. That resulted in „generation vacuum” and insufficient research which has been undertaken.
The text discusses names from 538 villages on the territory of Eastern and Western Prussia collected in the 70s of the 19th century for the German linguistic atlas, whose originator was Georg Wenker. These are equivalents of the German word das Kleid which appeared in one of the sentences of the questionnaire in oblique case: Geh, sei so gut und sag Deiner Schwester, sie sollte die Kleider für eure Mutter fertig nähen und mit der Bürste rein machen.
Various equivalents of this German lexeme appeared in the records of teachers from Ostróda region, Warmia and Masuria. The word odzienie seems to be the most frequent. Names belonging to general Polish language for many years were fixed in the questionnaires. These are: obleczenie, prziodzewek, przyodzienie, rzeczy, suknia, szaty, ubiór, ubranie.
Moreover, there was also the name klejdy typical for Northern Polish dialects and borrowed from German as well as klejdunek – derivated from klejdy.
A word characteristic for Warmia and neighbouring areas is obleka (together with its phonetic version obleta). Such words as chały, kłaki, kodry, korman, szmaty were sporadically recorded.
