Podhale dialect

The Podhale dialect refers to the language spoken by the Gorals

Gorals

The Gorale are a group of indigenous people found along southern Poland, northern Slovakia, and in the region of Cieszyn Silesia in the Czech Republic...

, or the highlanders living in the Tatra Mountains

Tatra Mountains

The Tatra Mountains, Tatras or Tatra , are a mountain range which forms a natural border between Slovakia and Poland, and are the highest mountain range in the Carpathian Mountains...

. The dialect, itself a part of the larger Lesser Polish dialectal group, is characterized as Proto-Slavic from the Eastern Lechitic, Old Polish

Polish language

Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

 area, superimposed by Slovak

Slovak language

Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...

.

In other words, the language is of Polish origin, but has been influenced by Slovak in recent centuries. The language contains Polish words, specific words, Vlach respectively words, Slovak words and words that are peculiar to the Carpathian language area (Carpathisms).

In Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz was a Polish journalist and Nobel Prize-winning novelist. A Polish szlachcic of the Oszyk coat of arms, he was one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his...

's 1900 novel The Teutonic Knights, the author had his characters speak a variety of medieval Polish which he recreated by utilizing many of the archaic expressions then still common among the highlanders of Podhale.