Balak (dialect)

Balak ( pol . Bałak ) - jargon , a social dialect of the Polish language , widespread in the cities of Galicia in the late XIX - first half of the XX century.

It is used by the less educated Poles of Drohobych , Borislav and other cities of Galicia . A characteristic feature of the balak is the saturation of vocabulary with Ukrainian words (common Ukrainian and dialect) and the great influence of Ukrainian phonetics (“chlib” instead of “chleb”, “h” instead of “g” in many words, etc.). With the Ukrainian urban dialect, the balak also has a common borrowing of German words, especially related to Austrian realities in administration, economics, and military life. In many cases, the balak turned into a mixed Polish-Ukrainian dialect, especially when people of Ukrainian origin used it. Styling under a balak was the main means of individualizing the text of the works of some Polish prose writers from Western Ukraine ( Andrzej Htsiuk , Atlantis: Rozpovіd about the Great Principality of Balak ) and authors of humorous lyric poems and lyrics ( Marjan Hemar ). Partly from Polish literature, and partly from the dialect of Lviv Ukrainians of the older generation, elements of the balak have recently been borrowed by individual Lviv Ukrainian writers ( Yuri Vinnichuk ).

Some sources refer the Lviv dialect to the balak, but it is worth remembering that the Lviv dialect differs from the balak in the variety of borrowings: for example, the balak is formed as a result of Ukrainian borrowings in the Polish language, and the basis for the Lviv dialect is a mixture of Polish , Ukrainian , German and Yiddish . That is, despite the same reasons for the formation, the balak and the Lviv dialect have different foundations, and also significantly differ from each other.