Dialects are not taught at schools, though they sometime serve as the first language for children in the countryside (at least in some parts of the Podlasie region). Those who speak a dialect always speak the official language of the country, which is Polish. The nearby passenger’s comment is somewhat understandable, because Poland is predominantly a monolingual country and a potential dialect might rise a few eyebrows. At some point one of the passengers nearby whispered loudly to his neighbour: “Can you hear them? They must be Russian!” 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. My father told me a story that happened to two of his friends on a tram in Warsaw in the 1980s. Joanna Dolińska looks at language diversity and language policy.
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