Swój / obcy w świadomości mieszkańców lubelskich wsi
Us/them (own/foreign) in the consciousness of the country inhabitants of the Lublin region

Summary/Abstract: The author presents the linguistic-cultural picture of the relationship US / THEM (OWN / FOREIGN) on the basis of the accounts of elderly country inhabitants of the Lublin region. The material was collected between 1995 and 2005. The stereotype of someone from outside (one of THEM), entrenched in the consciousness of the subjects, is captured in several aspects: territorial, national, religious, cultural, psychological, in terms of lifestyle and appearance. The multitude of the criteria makes foreignness gradable. One of THEM is above all a Jew, because of the religion, occupation (trade), behaviour, clothes and appearance. At the same time, however, a Jew is close in the territorial sense, is one of US. A German is also foreign, with memories of WWII as a cruel person who hates Poles, who speaks an unintelligible language but is impressively clean and rich. The least foreign is a Russian or Ukrainian, a “brother-Slav”, sometimes treated even as one of US. The author also claims that the US / THEM contrast also has a purely linguistic nature manifested in the oppositions known / unknown, contemporary / old, and even standard Polish / folk dialectal Polish. Foreign is the thing unknown and distant, what belongs to the past (from the point of view of the younger generation) or to the present (for the older generation). Therefore the category of foreignness is not only gradable but also ambivalently valuated.

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