Speech of the inhabitants of Spisz: Sociolinguistic observations about the disappearance of selected dialectal features

In the present paper we examine the extent to which age, gender, and education affect the use of the Spisz regional dialect. It is widely assumed that only elderly speakers use pure dialect with no influences of the standard variety of Polish, whereas other generations mix the dialectal with the standard grammar. The data are drawn from the Spisz Corpus. Eight features were chosen, six of them pertaining to inflection, two others to syntax. Though the number of non-dialectal features increases with each generation, it remains, however, quite limited. Still, this is not true in the case of the syntactic idiosyncrasies of the regional dialect, which are almost entirely abandoned by younger generations. Also, women are more prone to use dialectal forms compared to men. Finally, the higher the education of the speaker, the higher the amount of non-dialectal forms, again with the notable exception of academic degree holders, who master code-switching better. In general, however, the Spisz regional dialect is well-preserved by its speakers.