Miraslau Yankovyak
More than 100 years ago, linguists and ethnographers studying dialects, spiritual and material culture, defined the boundaries of the Belarusian ethnic settlement. The line defined, for example, by A. Rytsik in 1875 or Y. Karski in 1903 significantly extended beyond the modern borders of Belarus. Belarusians lived in territories that today belong to Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia. This also applies to the southern part of the Pskov region (not in the historical sense, but specifically that part which once belonged to the Vitebsk province and since 1957 has been within the borders of the modern Pskov region).
Statistical data from the late 19th and early 20th centuries clearly show that these counties were populated by Belarusians and had an obviously Belarusian character. For example, in the 1860s in the Nevel district, Belarusians made up 60.8% of the total population, in the Velizh and Sebezh districts – even 90.2% and 80.9% (for comparison, Poles accounted for 0.9%, 3.1%, and 2.2%, respectively). These data also confirm the research of Y. Karski, members of the Moscow Dialectological Commission (1914), and P. Buzuk (1926). P. Buzuk personally visited the Nevel and Velizh districts and unequivocally confirmed the Belarusian character of the speech of the local population. The residents of these lands also saw their linguistic difference from Russians and Belarusians from the south. Buzuk cites in his publication the words of a resident of the former Velizh district: “They call us pylyaki (i.e., Belarusians – P.B.) when we go beyond Velikie Luki, but beyond Nevel they laugh at us just for speaking more Russian.”
Changes in scientific approaches regarding the linguistic affiliation of local dialects occurred after World War II. Indeed, as late as 1949, the famous linguist R. Avanesov classified these territories as Belarusian-speaking, but all subsequent works (e.g., textbooks on Russian dialectology) classify these lands as part of the “western zone of the South Russian dialect,” with the boundary between Belarusian and Russian dialects being… the administrative border. Unfortunately, this viewpoint did not provoke an official protest from Belarusian linguists.
More than 100 years have passed since Karski’s research, and I decided to verify how the linguistic situation and the identification of residents of southern Pskov region have changed. The data from the All-Russian Population Census (2002) are now very unambiguous: Belarusians in the Nevel district make up only 2.26% of the total population (or 711 people), a similar situation exists in the Sebezh district. I turned to linguistic materials. The analysis of the distribution of linguistic features presented in the “Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language” (1986, 1989) confirmed what any historian or dialectologist would expect – in most cases, these boundaries coincide with the former borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Vitebsk province. The Pskov Regional Dictionary also shows that even after World War II, many Belarusianisms remained in the language of the population (father, batyan, potato, to know, he, when, his, etc.). I visited southern Pskov region twice – in the summer of 2014 and 2015, studying villages near Sebezh and Nevel (the most northern fortified points of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania). The red line indicates the settlement of the Belarusian ethnic group according to dialects.
I focused primarily on the sociolinguistic situation and the question of national identity. All individuals I spoke with very clearly emphasized their Russian nationality, sometimes mentioning a Polish grandmother or a Polish great-grandfather, but none of them identified as Belarusians. However, a deeper investigation into the issue yielded certain results. A woman (born in 1939) from the northern part of the Sebezh district, who was born in the small village of Rzhavki Litovskie (on the other side of the river are Rzhavki Russkie – this was the former border of the Vitebsk province), when I asked her how the population of Pskov region was referred to on different sides of the border, said: “They called us pylyaki, Litvins, and we called them skabaryami…”
Such responses I heard more than once, with the words Poles, Litvins, Belarusians being used as synonyms or as a counterpoint to Russia. This indicates that in the consciousness of the local population of the oldest age, the former administrative and state divisions still exist today. The search for other traces of Belarusian identity did not yield significant results. This is not surprising – there were no Belarusian schools, organizations, or Belarusian press here. There are also no gravestones with inscriptions in Belarusian, but there are in Polish (e.g., in Sebezh). Belarusian identity could not be preserved in these lands, as it also had no chance to form on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries. The situation was different in Podlachia, Vilnius region, Latgale, or even Smolensk region, where Belarusian schools operated during the interwar period.
Life within the Russian state and dialects very close to Russian led to the local population calling their language Russian: “I have Russian language, Christian, Russian [woman, born in 1933, village Novakhavansk]; I have Russian, we all have Russian, we are all Russians [woman, born in 1932, village Spas-Balazdyn].” When I delve deeper into the topic and ask if their language is the same as that used on television, some respondents begin to pay attention to the “mixed” nature of their speech: “Sometimes there’s an accent, you notice yourself that it’s not purely Russian, Russian with a khokhol, Russian with a Jew, we took a lot from Poles [words] [woman, born in 1925, village Apukhlyki].” I also asked how Belarusians differ from Russians: “By work, you can tell, a Belarusian is very hardworking, and by language, you can tell, they speak in such a rough language. [They called potato] potato, onion – onion, beet, oh, you pulled beets there, a couple of beets to pull [woman, born in 1925, village Apukhlyki].” However, those Belarusians, even in the consciousness of residents south of Nevel, are considered far to the south of them and are completely different people, very distinct from themselves and their neighbors. This indicates a very intense process of Russification. Belarusian identity has survived in the dialects, and thus they became the main object of my research.
To verify the level of Russification of dialects compared to the times of Karski and Buzuk, I visited areas located in the northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest of Sebezh and Nevel. In this context, Belarusian dialects from the Latvian and Belarusian sides of the border can serve as very good comparative material. Once this was a common dialectal area, now individuals who speak them live in three different countries.
Regarding the northern borders of the former Vitebsk province, it is already difficult to speak of Belarusian dialects – the local language can already be considered Russian with elements of Belarusian dialects. Even during a conversation with a woman from Rzhavki Litovskie, Belarusian features are heard sporadically, even such characteristics of the Belarusian language as the voiced “h” or “unstressed u” are encountered less frequently than sounds characteristic of the Russian language. The palatalization and affrication here are not as pronounced as in neighboring regions of Latvia and Belarus.
The situation looks significantly better to the south of Sebezh and to the southwest of Nevel, where the language of the local population can be called a mixed Belarusian-Russian dialect. I managed to record almost all Belarusian features noted by Karski and Buzuk nearly a century ago at all levels of language (phonetics, morphology, lexicon, and syntax). However, they appear simultaneously with Russian features. Most of the local population believes they speak Russian, as the most Russian features can be found precisely in the lexicon. Phonetics interferes the least in interpersonal communication, so at this level of language structure, Belarusian features have been preserved best, and it is precisely based on phonetics that the belonging of specific dialects to a certain language is defined in linguistics. The Belarusian dialect in southern Pskov region has been the only bastion of Belarusian identity for almost the last 200 years. But the question arises: how long will it last? Compared to the times of Karski and Buzuk, the boundaries of its distribution have shrunk by several dozen kilometers. The only support for Belarusian identity in these lands can be only traders from Belarus who come to local markets in Sebezh and Nevel and offer Russians potatoes, onions, and beets, rather than kartoshka, luk, or svyekla.
Translation into Belarusian: Andrei Tikhamirov
The article appeared in English in Belarusian Review, Vol. 27, No. 3-4.
© 2015 The_Point Journal/Belarusian Review
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