Need Experts! Please tell me what Kind of Ukrainian I Actually Speek

[Alahn]

I have been trying for years now to narrow down a dialect or some other language my baba speaks.

I offer some examples to analyze from what I know:
#'s
1=yeden
2=dwa
3=tri
4=shtiri
5=pyat
6=shes
7=shem
8=oshem
9=dehwyat
10=dehsyat
I love you=Ya Tebe Lubyu
I know=ya znam you know=tih znash
now/immediately=teras
we're going=mih ihdemeh
we will be going=mih pihdemeh
apple=yapka
put back=Polozh nazat
say/will say=kazala/skazala f. kazal/skazaw

I think this phrase means "close the windows"
=wuzmee dwehree

please help out

[candle]

This is exactly how my grandmother used to speak. I▓m often joking around with my friends from Lviv by using this dialect. It▓s fun and really represent Galicia as western region of Ukraine.

[Volodya987]

Poland is near Germany too. Try speaking Polish to Germans.

[Alahn]

I have some other words examples need help!

your=washee
this=toto

[Zbyszek]

Hi Alahn,
You need to understand that both Polish and Ukrainian have many local dialects and although the differences are usually not dramatic, they may cause numerous misunderstandings.
My aunt who was born in central Poland in 1905, moved to Ukraine after WWI and she was a simple village woman without education. She had no basic diffculty in understanding a local Volhynian (Ukrainian) dialect.
Polish language has been under enormous pressure of Radio and TV so rural dialects are almost dead by now.
When my American family of Polish ancestry visited me three years in Poland, he spoke this nice village dialect I used to hear many years ago! He could not write Polish but he could speak it quite well and we roared with laughs when, after many hours of driving, he got off my car and said: Zbyszek, ale me dupa boli!

[candle]

Zbyszek!!!!!!!

[LemkoRusyn]

Originally posted by Alahn
I have been trying for years now to narrow down a dialect or some other language my baba speaks.

I offer some examples to analyze from what I know:
#'s
1=yeden
2=dwa
3=tri
4=shtiri
5=pyat
6=shes
7=shem
8=oshem
9=dehwyat
10=dehsyat
I love you=Ya Tebe Lubyu
I know=ya znam you know=tih znash
now/immediately=teras
we're going=mih ihdemeh
we will be going=mih pihdemeh
apple=yapka
put back=Polozh nazat
say/will say=kazala/skazala f. kazal/skazaw

Alahn,
You have described exactly (and beautifully, I might add) the Rusyn language, particularly, a Lemko (i.e., westernmost) dialect of Rusyn. From the words you typed I can see that your family comes either from the western part of the Lemko Region in southeast Poland (by western part, I mean around Nowy Sacz, Krynica, Grybow or Gorlice) or northeastern Slovakia (where my family comes from).

My family speaks exactly the same way. We are from about the eastern edge of the "teraz" area; any further east and the word becomes "teper" to mean "now", "presently".

Do you know what villages your family comes from? If you don't, I can probably narrow it down to a very specific area if you give clues like their surname(s) and where they settled in the USA.

I think this phrase means "close the windows"
=wuzmee dwehree

Close the door, but close enough!

Lemko, or Rusyn, absolutely is a language and is considered so by the Polish government. In the 2002 census, citizens were asked their mother tongue (native language), to which one of the official answers they could give was Lemko.

A grammar of the Lemko language was published a few years ago in Poland:
Henryk Fontanski - Miroslawa Chomiak: Gramatyka jezyka lemkowskiego / ╔ПЮЛЮРШЙЮ КЕЛЙЁБЯЙНЦН ЪГШЙЮ. Katowice, 2000.

The language is also taught in several elementary schools in the Lemko Region and in Legnica and Wroclaw, and at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Here are some links of interest:

info on Rusyn language and its dialects:
http://www.rusyn.org/index.php?root=rusyns&rusyns=lang

on Rusyns/Lemkos:
http://www.rutenika.pl/en/01/01.html
http://www.carpathorusynsociety.org
http://www.era.anthropology.ac.uk/Te.../chap25-1.html
http://www.lemko.org
http://web.archive.org/web/200105160...tho-rusyn.org/

poetry in Lemko Rusyn language:
http://strony.wp.pl/wp/rusyn/spistomikowcyr.htm

a scholarly article "Lemkos in Poland" written in the Lemko Rusyn language:
http://www.lemko.org/lemko/duc/index01.html

Also see my response on Lemkos on this forum, here:
http://www.ukraine.com/forums/showth...?threadid=6197

Click on my profile to send me a private message if you want help identifying your homeland villages.