Lwów dialect

The Lwów dialect (Polish: gwara lwowska, Ukrainian: Львівська ґвара) is a subdialect (gwara) of the Polish language characteristic of the inhabitants of the city of Lviv (Polish: Lwów, Ukrainian: Львів), now in Ukraine. Based on the substratum of the Lesser Polish dialect, it was heavily influenced by borrowings (mostly lexical) from other languages spoken in Galicia, notably Ukrainian (Ruthenian), German and Yiddish, but also by Czech, and Hungarian.

One of the peculiarities of the Lwów dialect was its popularity. Unlike many other dialects of the Polish language, it was not seen by its speakers as inferior to literary Polish or denoting people of humble origin. Because of that it was being used both by common people and university professors alike. It was also one of the first Polish dialects to be properly classified and to have a dictionary published. Despite that, the best known form of the Lwów dialect was the Bałak, a sociolect of the commoners, street hooligans and youngsters.

The Lwów dialect emerged in the nineteenth century and gained much popularity and recognition in the 1920s and 1930s, in part due to countrywide popularity of numerous artists and comedians using it. Among them were Marian Hemar, Szczepcio, and Tońcio, the latter two being authors of the highly acclaimed Wesoła lwowska fala weekly broadcast in the Polish Radio. Emanuel Szlechter, the screenwriter of "Włoczęgi" and songwriter of Polish pre-war hits, wrote some of his songs in the Lwów dialect ("Ni mo jak Lwów").

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Wikipedia