4.3.2. Language Use and Language Functions

If we look at actual language use in the Białystok and Hrodna regions, we find that there is no clear connection between this aspect of language behavior and national identity, inasmuch on the Polish side there are now many Orthodox, both Poles and Belarusians, who speak Polish as a first language, and many Catholics on both sides of the border who are speakers of dialectal or standard Belarusian. In addition, on the Belarusian side of the border, we find many Belarusians and Poles who speak primarily Russian in the home.
The data from a 1993 survey by Sadowski include responses to questions about the language used at home, which provides a rough indication of the first language of the respondents (in contrast to “native language” (Bel. ródnaja mova, Pol. język ojczysty, Rus. rodnoj jazyk), which in the context of the borderlands, as we will see later, is a highly ideologized concept that does not necessarily reflect actual linguistic behavior). Sadowski’s survey, based on a representative sample of the population of the Białystok region (excluding the exclusively Catholic regions), indicates that 83% of Poles and 25% of Belarusians speak Polish at home. Of the Poles, an additional 14% claimed to speak Belarusian or a Belarusian dialect, while 15% claimed to speak a Polish dialect (in other words, some respondents indicated the use of more than one language in the home environment).^[1] With regard to the term “Polish dialect,” it should be noted that many Belarusian-speaking Catholics consider their dialect a variety of Polish rather than of Belarusian. Among Belarusians, 20% claimed to speak Belarusian, while the majority, 73.9%, claimed to speak a Belarusian dialect at home.
Statistics from a 1989 survey of language use in the Hrodna region as a whole indicate that roughly 16.3%% of Belarusians and 16.2%% of Poles claimed to use Belarusian at home, while 41.3% of Belarusians and 33.3% of Poles claimed to speak a mixture of Belarusian and Russian at home. In addition, 42.5% of Belarusians and 27.1% of Poles indicated that they spoke Russian in the home environment. Only 13% of the Polish population indicated that Polish was the language of the home.^[2] Sadowski’s 1993 survey of the westernmost rajons of the Hrodna region gave the following results: 19.4% of Belarusians and 14.6% of Poles claimed to use Belarusian as the home language, 38.3% of the Belarusians and 34.4% of Poles claimed to speak a dialect of Belarusian, and 44.4% of Belarusians and 40.6% of Poles claimed to speak Russian in the home environment.^[3] The higher figures for Russian in Sadowski’s sample may reflect the greater urban bias of his survey, with more than a third of respondents from the city of Hrodna.
The statistics on language use, however, do not reveal an important function of language in the construction of national identity – its symbolic status as a marker of membership in the nation. The linguistic ideologies of 19th century European Romantic nationalism have had a major impact not only on how modern nationalist movements look at language, but how the public (and even many in the scholarly community) conceive of language issues as well. On the basis of content analysis of the western European press, the Dutch sociolinguists Blommaert and Verschueren note the extent to which the popular media in Europe have internalized the ideological framework of ethnolinguistic nationalism, particularly in the coverage of issues relating to stateless peoples: “[d]escent, history, culture, religion, and language are treated as a feature cluster. Their identificational function implies separability, a natural discontinuity in the real world. These discontinuities are ‘nations’ or ‘peoples,’ i.e. natural groups... If feathers are predictive of beaks, eggs, and an ability to fly, so is a specific language predictive of a distinct history and culture... Thus, the absence of the feature ‘distinct language’ tends to cast doubts on the legitimacy of claims to nationhood.”^[4] There is little doubt that a similar study of the press of East Central and Eastern Europe would reveal a very similar picture. The question is, to what extent does the simplistic equation between language and national identity presented in much of the European popular media reflect objective reality, and to what extent does it influence the identities, attitudes and linguistic choices of non-elites?
From its inception in the late 19th century, the modern Belarusian national movement assigned a preeminent position to language in defining the nation, and the “language as national identity” motif has remained central to Belarusian nationalism throughout this century – despite signs of progressing language shift toward Russian (and Polish on the Polish side of the post-WWII border) in recent decades. The notion that ethnic Belarusians are inherently Belarusian speakers is even reflected in the title of a Belarusian language textbook for Russian speakers: Belorusskij jazyk dlja nebelorusov (“Belarusian for Non-Belarusians”) implying that only non-Belarusians need instruction in the Belarusian language. In the context of ongoing language shift, the notion of the language as something rooted in the genetic make-up of the nation, even if only employed as a metaphor, also becomes an important motif in the discourse of language advocates. Thus, in a recent issue of “Litaratura i mastactva” the weekly newspaper of the Belarusian creative intelligentsia, we read: “only the language of this land, encoded in our genes, is capable of forming a fully realized individual, a true citizen, and assist in the development of all the potential and abilities of the child.”^[5] A similar stance is noted by Alexandra Jaffe in the case of Corsican language advocates in contemporary France: “every true Corsican is represented as a potential natural, authentic speaker. Those who do not speak the language have simply not actualized instinctual cultural abilities.”^[6]
Elite notions of a coterminous relationship between nationality and native language have been accepted to a large extent by the population of the Polish-Belarusian border region, as least as far as can be determined from survey data. However, the concept of the “native language” is just as problematic in this region as the concept of national or ethnic identity. In my own fieldwork I encountered speakers of what was essentially Belarusian-accented Russian (such as the wife of a collective farm chairman in the village of Indura on the Belarusian side of the border), who claimed that their native language was Belarusian. In the same village I met a Catholic woman who spoke a fairly conservative variety of the local dialect, but claimed that Russian was her native language. On the Polish side of the border, I spoke with Catholic Belarusian dialect speakers in the village of Hało who all insisted that their native language was Polish. Thus, it would appear that self-declared native language, as reflected in official census data and other types of surveys, is more an indicator of a specific ideological or cultural orientation than of actual linguistic competence and language use.
In the chart below, I cite the results on native language from Sadowski’s 1993 survey of the population on the two sides of the border. With respect to the data from the Białystok region, the most striking finding is that over 95% of Polish respondents consider Polish their native language. In other parts of Poland (excluding, perhaps, Kashubia and Silesia) this would not be a surprising result, but given the fact that many Catholic settlements to the north and east of Białystok are still Belarusian-speaking (at least among the older and middle generations), we must consider this a reflection above all of the national identity of the respondents. This is also suggested by the fact that among those in the Białystok region who consciously identify themselves as Belarusian, the percentage of those who claim Belarusian or a Belarusian dialect as a native language increases to nearly 65%. This figure is comparable with that for Belarusians on the Belarusian side (78%), for whom, however, standard Belarusian (rather than Belarusian dialects) is the primary symbol of national affiliation, reflecting perhaps the dominant view (promoted primarily in the educational sphere) that the standard language is the sole legitimate form of the national language.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/wolh1.jpg>
Fig. 1. Native Language of Respondents in the Białystok and Hrodna Regions62

Significantly, only 30% of Poles on the Belarusian side indicate Polish as their native language, while even fewer (between 13% and 18% according to Mikulič and Sadowski) claim to use Polish as the language of the home.^[7] In my data from the mixed Catholic-Orthodox villages of Indura, Luckauljany and Malaja Berastavica, as well as the all-Catholic village of Љuryčy on the Belarusian side of the border, out of some 80 Catholic informants, only one (a woman in her 70s) claimed to use Polish in the home.
The low numbers of Poles claiming Polish as a native language have been erroneously interpreted by some western scholars, such as Gordon, who writes of Polish “linguistic assimilation” to Belarusian in rural areas in the Hrodna region.^[8] However, as attested by historical and ethnographic data, the majority of these Polish communities have not “lost” their Polish, but rather simply never had the opportunity to acquire it, at least as a first language. In other words, we are speaking here of the absence of assimilation to Polish, or at best, the loss of non-native competence in Polish within a community for which Belarusian dialect is the native vernacular. The absence of a strong correlation between Polish nationality and Polish as a native language in the Hrodna region may be said to reflect the still ambiguous nature of the Polish identity on the Belarusian side of the border, being transitional between the traditional confessional and cultural conception and the modern ethnolinguistic model.
In my own sociolinguistic survey of the villages on the two sides of the border, I also investigated the relationship between self-declared nationality and self-declared native language. Overall, in the Orthodox village of Jałowo, 33% of Belarusians claimed Belarusian as their native language, while 67% indicated that pa-prostu (Belarusian dialect) was their native language. With respect to Orthodox Poles, 83% indicated Polish as their native language, while only 17% indicated pa-prostu. In the Catholic village of Hało, on the other hand, all informants indicated Polish as their native language, although most of the informants indicated that they used the local Belarusian dialect (pa-prostu, pa-svojmu) with nearly all members of their family (with Polish predominating only in communication with grandchildren and children born after 1960).
On the Belarusian side of the border, on the other hand, we find that the category “mixed language” (zmešanaja mova/zmešany jazyk) has largely supplanted pa-prostu or pa-svojmu among speakers born after the 1930s and 1940s. Overall, 82% of Belarusians and 61% of Poles claimed Belarusian as their native language, while 12% of Belarusians and 19% of Poles gave Russian as their native language.
One factor that could have contributed to the higher figure for Russian among Poles is that two of the predominantly Polish communities investigated, Indura and Luckauljany, are closer to the regional urban center Hrodna (however, among the Orthodox in Indura, only 16% gave Russian as their native language as opposed to 38% of Poles, while in Luckauljany, the percentage of Poles and Orthodox Belarusians claiming Russian as a native language was the same, 20% for both groups).
The fact that there is a significant gap between language use and the function of language as a symbol of national identity in the Białystok and Hrodna regions is also highlighted by Sadowski’s data concerning the views of respondents as to the characteristics required for an individual to be considered a member of a given nation. In the Białystok region, 82.3% of Catholics and 75.2% of Orthodox indicated that to be a Pole, one must speak Polish. In the western Hrodna region, 72.1% of Catholics and 74.1% of Orthodox indicated the importance of speaking Polish for a person to be considered a Pole.^[9] In the case of being Belarusian, 69.8% of the respondents on the Polish side, and 72.8% on the Belarusian side said that one must speak Belarusian (the data are not broken down by religion of respondents).^[10] However, at a more concrete level, i.e. at the level of the individual respondent, we find that language is less central in conceptions of national identity. Thus, in response to the question, “what unites you with your nation above all?”, having one’s own distinct language was indicated, among other criteria, by 41% of Poles and 59% of Belarusians in the Białystok region, and by only 26% of Poles and 27% of Belarusians in the Hrodna region.^[11]
Languages, especially in their standard written form, can also function as an instrument of assertion of state sovereignty and border delineation. The Polish-Belarusian border is in this sense a symbolic border (as understood at the official level) between the Russian- and Belarusian- speaking worlds and the Polish speech community. The official conception of state border as linguistic frontier is reflected in the symbolic space created by the language of street names, roadsigns, store signs, advertisements, signs on government buildings, posters, etc. All of these visual manifestations of linguistic territoriality constitute what Landry and Bourhis term the “linguistic landscape.”^[12]
In the years following 1990, in the Białystok region the private sector made some concessions to regional linguistic diversity by posting signs in Russian aimed at traders from Belarus and Russia; of course these signs were clearly oriented toward the “other”, i.e. not the local East Slavic population. In the political sphere, the appearance of campaign posters in Belarusian during the 1989 elections and after aroused considerable emotion; in many cases, such posters, viewed as a challenge to the hegemony of Polish on the territory of the Polish state, were torn down immediately. Similarly, the demands of Belarusian organizations such as the Belarusian Democratic Alliance to permit the visual presence of Belarusian in the form of bilingual road signs and signs on public buildings in areas with an Orthodox majority met with resistance and open hostility on the part of the regional authorities and part of the local population.
On the Belarusian side of the border, Russian had become the dominant language of the linguistic landscape by the 1960s, although Belarusian-language texts continued to appear sporadically in the public arena, particularly in the cultural sphere. In 1989-1994, however, some efforts were made to increase the number of Belarusian-language signs, including road signs and street names, as well as some shop signs. Since the private sector was still virtually non-existent, and government regulations restricted the use of languages other than Russian and Belarusian even in commercial signs, the visual presence of Polish in Hrodna and other smaller communities along the western border was minimal.

4.3.3. Language Attitudes

The construction and reproduction of ethnic and social boundaries through language are grounded not only in objective differences in linguistic form, but also in culture-specific and ideologically-loaded conceptions of what aspects of linguistic structure and language use are relevant in determining group membership. What ordinary speakers believe about the relationship between language and group or national identity, and about the sociolinguistic hierarchy of language varieties in use in their own linguistic repertoires and those of neighboring communities, is thus of central importance for understanding the structure of the local speech economy and the functional allocation and social distribution of linguistic resources within the community. Such local conceptions do not, however, arise in a vacuum; they are, at least in modern societies, crucially shaped by government policies which seek to promote among speakers of diverse vernacular language varieties subjective identification with, and sociolinguistic subordination to, a codified language variety that is commonly designated the “national language.”
The process of the attitudinal and functional subordination of non-standard and minority language speakers to a codified national standard language comes into sharpest relief in border regions such as the Polish-Belarusian border region. The choice of linguistic identities on the part of local populations in such border regions is to a significant extent constrained by state-managed identity planning policies, implemented via the educational system, mass media, and other institutions, which tend to focus populations on a single national language and culture. However, the homogenizing influence of national languages and cultures on local populations must not be overestimated; various forms of overt or covert resistance to dominant linguistic ideologies are often observed among borderlands populations. In many cases, on the same side of the border, different sub-groups within local communities of vernacular speakers may respond differently to official identity-planning policies as a consequence of preexisting socio-cultural divisions.
As Labov has argued, in sociolinguistic terms a speech community is defined less by a high degree of congruence in the use of certain linguistic structures than by the presence of a shared system of language norms, as reflected in both overt attitudes and abstract patterns of linguistic variation associated with different contextual styles.^[13] In order to determine whether we can still speak of the dialects of the Belarusian-Polish borderlands as still constituting a single speech community in the Labovian sense, in this section I will examine differences in language attitudes (toward the local dialect, standard Belarusian, Russian and Polish) among dialect speakers on both sides of the border.
In order to investigate some of the affective correlates of language use and the ideological construct of “native language” in the Polish-Belarusian borderlands, I included in the sociolinguistic questionnaire the questions “Which language do you like to speak most?” and “Which language do you like most of all?”. The results are shown in Figures (2) and (3) below.

Fig. 2. Which language do you like to speak most of all?

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/wolh2.jpg>

P = Poland
B = Belarus
† = Roman Catholic
‡ = Orthodox

Fig. 3. Which language do you like most of all?

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/wolh3.jpg>

On both sides of the border, we find that in everyday communication a majority of respondents prefer to use a non-standard variety, whether dialect (pa-prostu) on the Polish side, or mixed Belarusian-Russian on the Belarusian side. The preference for what are designated as mixed Belarusian-Russian varieties in intra-group communication on the Belarusian side of the border suggests that although the traditional dialects no longer function as the primary markers of local identity, neither standard Belarusian nor standard Russian have acquired a fully hegemonic position in the local speech economy. It could be argued that the attraction of the mixed Belarusian-Russian varieties to villagers lies in the fact that mixed language allows them to assert two identities at once: loyalty to the local “team”, and “modernity”, which is associated with urban (i.e. primarily Russophone) culture.
In the questionnaire, I also investigated possible links between the traditionally most salient marker of supra-local identity, religion, and language, by posing the question: how would you feel about the use of Belarusian in your church? Respondents in Hało on the Polish side of the border were perplexed – such a possibility had never even occurred to them. When I reformulated the question, asking whether they would approve of the use of their native dialect, pa-prostu, in sermons, the liturgy, and prayers in place of Polish, most became highly indignant (it will be recalled that all informants in Hało indicated that their native language was Polish). In contrast, in the Catholic village of Љuryčy, on the Belarusian side of the border, all informants but one (a ten-year old girl) indicated that they had a positive view of the use of Belarusian instead of Polish in church. Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents in Љuryčy (83%) also gave Belarusian as their native language. The degree of acceptance of Belarusian in the religious sphere showed similar, if slightly less dramatic, differences among Orthodox respondents on the two sides of the border. In the Orthodox community of Jałowo in the Białystok region, only 20% of informants approved of the use of Belarusian in church instead of Church Slavonic, Polish and Russian; in contrast, in the Orthodox community of Macveewcy-Ulezly on the Belarusian side, 78% expressed support for the use of Belarusian in church.
Since the standard language is considered the primary linguistic measure of national identity, in the written questionnaire, informants were asked a number of questions concerning the language varieties in use in the community, including the following: “Would you like to be able to speak Belarusian the way it is spoken on Belarusian radio and television?” The language of the electronic media was specifically chosen as a point of reference, since for most people in the region, this is the most common source of exposure to the standard language. Out of 160 respondents, 93% said that they would like to be able to speak standard Belarusian, while on the Polish side of the border, 50% of the respondents (out of a total of 38) answered in the affirmative. Significantly, however, on the Polish side of the border there was a marked discrepancy between Belarusian-speaking Orthodox and Catholics with respect to their attitudes toward standard Belarusian: in the Orthodox village of Jałowo, 60% of the respondents gave a positive answer, while in the Catholic village of Hało, only 40% answered in the affirmative.
In the sociolinguistic questionnaire, respondents were also asked to indicate, if possible, the reasons for their answers. These explanations are also revealing with respect to popular conceptions of the standard language and its relationship to national identity on both sides of the border. Among the positive responses, the most common related to such criteria as: 1) aesthetic qualities/correctness; 2) native language; 3) national identity; 3) and usefulness (“it may come in handy”; “it’s good to know more than one language”; “one should know the language of one’s neighbors,” etc.).
Orthodox respondents on both sides of the border were more likely than Catholics to make reference to aesthetic and ethnolinguistic criteria in their evaluations of standard Belarusian, e.g.: “I like the way it sounds”, “”it’s a beautiful language,” “because it’s more attractive than Russian,” “because it’s closer to me than Russian,” “because we speak Belarusian”, “because it’s my native language,” “because I am a Belarusian,” “because we live in Belarus,” although utilitarian motivations are also common, particularly on the Polish side of the border, for example: “it may come in handy” (“moža prydasca”), “it’s good to know several languages, “ etc. At the same time, it should be noted that on the Polish side of the border, attitudes toward local speech forms are also quite positive among most dialect speakers; one Orthodox informant in his 20s replied that he wouldn’t want to speak literary Belarusian, “in order to preserve the language of our fathers” ( “kab zaxavac’ movu bac’kow”), while others simply stated that “our way of speaking is better” ( “pa-svojmu lepej”).
Significantly, among the 40% of respondents in the Belarusian-speaking Catholic village of Hało who indicated that they would like to be able to speak literary Belarusian, the explanations given were exclusively utilitarian, reflecting the absence of any emotional ethnocultural attachment to the Belarusian standard language: “Belarus is our neighbor,” “Belarusian is somewhat similar to Polish.” The only markedly emotional responses were those of the other 60% who indicated a total lack of interest in being able to speak standard Belarusian: “I hate it”, “what good is it?”, “it’s an ugly language”, etc.
Interestingly, however, while Belarusian-speaking Catholics on the Polish side of the border have a generally neutral or negative attitude toward the Belarusian standard language, their attitude toward their local dialect is as positive as that of their Orthodox neighbors (in Hało, for example, 80% indicated that they considered their local dialect beautiful, as compared with just over 80% in the Orthodox village of Jałowo).
On the Belarusian side of the border, overt attitudes toward the local dialect are much less favorable, the majority of respondents preferring either standard Belarusian or Russian. For most villagers on the Belarusian side of the border, literary Belarusian is viewed essentially in the same terms as literary Russian – that is, as a related code, but distinctly different from what they speak (even though the dialects of this region are quite close to the literary standard in most respects). While the older generations, particularly those born prior to 1940, generally refer to their home language as “pa-prostu” (“the simple way of speaking”), “prostaja mova” (“simple language”), “pa-svojmu” (“our way of speaking”), “svaja havorka” (“our own dialect”), the generations born after the 1940s increasingly designate their speech as “zmešanaja mova/zmešany jazyk” (“mixed language”), usually implying by this a mixture of Belarusian and Russian, and in some cases, Polish. This evaluation, as the linguistic data from the region testify, is a fairly accurate assessment on the part of younger villagers of an ongoing breakdown in the intergenerational transmission of traditional dialect features.
Thus, the data on language attitudes suggest that the sociolinguistic integration of Belarusian dialect speakers on the two sides of the border into two different regional and national speech communities is as yet incomplete and shows some contradictory aspects, but appears to be progressing apace. On the Polish side of the border, the majority of Belarusian speakers can be said to be integrated to a significant extent into the Polish speech economy regardless of the language used for in-group interaction. The local dialects, still generally referred to as pa-prostu, serve primarily as a marker of local, rather than ethnic identity for most respondents. On the Belarusian side of the border, the majority of the rural population are integrated into a Russo-Belarusian speech community, in which Russian and Belarusian are complementary and at times overlapping “High” forms of language, while mixed Russo-Belarusian forms of speech have largely supplanted the traditional dialects as markers of in-group, local solidarity in rural communities.

5. CONCLUSION

The ways in which national identities, developed in and propagated from political or ethnolinguistic core areas, are adopted, modified or resisted by the populations on the periphery is a question of fundamental importance in the study of modern nationalism. Indeed, it may be said that the contingent and mutable nature of national identities, whether state-sponsored or the product of the activities of nationalist counter-elites, is brought into sharpest focus in borderlands regions. It is precisely in border regions, where ethnographic characteristics, languages, and religious affiliations often fail to coincide, that national identities are most clearly constructed through the selective use of certain markers of group identity. In this study of the Polish-Belarusian borderlands I have sought not only to shed some new light on the ways in which state and non-state actors can promote or hinder the development of certain national identities within a pre-national ethnolinguistic community, but also on the role of political borders in divergent and convergent ethnolinguistic processes.