My father told me a story that happened to two of his friends on a tram in Warsaw in the 1980s. Both men were from the Podlasie region in northeast Poland and were having a conversation in their local dialect, which is a mixture of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian. At some point one of the passengers nearby whispered loudly to his neighbor: “Can you hear them? They must be Russian!”
The nearby passenger’s comment is somewhat understandable, because Poland is predominantly a monolingual country and a potential dialect might raise a few eyebrows. Those who speak a dialect always speak the …read more
Source: The Irrawaddy
