Exponents of Dialect Stylization in „Młodość Jasia Kunefała” by Stanisław Piętak

Abstract

Dialect stylization has become a device typical of Polish prose on life in the country. The turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries saw the development of the peasant trend represented by Stanislaw Piętak, a poet and prose writer from Wielowieś, located in between Sandomierz and Tarnobrzeg. It is an area where the Sandomierz dialect is adjacent to the Lasowiacy dialect. His novel titled Młodość Jasia Kunefała published in 1938 is the first part of a literary trilogy about the life of Jan Kunefał’s family. The text is saturated with dialectal elements, especially in the dialogue layer.

The article discusses the most important exponents of dialect stylization in the novel. Piętak rendered phonetic features typical of the dialect, such as the occurrence of vowels different from those in the Polish language in justified positions, different realization of nasal vowels, mazuration, depalatalization of consonants m and w under the influence of Mazovian dialects. The characters’ speech is distinguished by dialect word formation, inflection and syntactic phenomena, vocabulary typical of rural culture, including rich dialectal onomastics.

Although the basis for the stylization is the dialect known to the writer from autopsy (the dialect of Wielowieś, many of the features transferred to the novel are typical of the general dialect of central and northern Lesser Poland. The intention of the author was to reflect the rural colour manifested in the language