Imiona mniejszości litewskiej w Polsce

This article analyses the given names of members of the Lithuanian minority in Poland. It is based on a Lithuanian telephone directory issued in Punsk in 1997, in which a significant number of personal names are recorded in the Lithuanian form. Their comparison with the corresponding data in two Polish telephone directories from a similar period revealed over two hundred "given name + surname" pairs in two language versions: Lithuanian and Polish. About eighty pairs in which the names differed in spelling and morphology have been extracted for analysis. In the analysis of given names, also Kazimierz Rymut's name dictionary (1995) has been used to establish the frequency of selected names in the Suwalki region and beyond. The statistically significant higher turnout of names of Lithuanian origin in the Suwalki region than in the rest of Poland was confirmed in almost all cases. It was also established that the occurrence of Lithuanian given names in unassimilated form is more frequent there. The frequency of the given names which appear in the aforementioned Lithuanian telephone directory and on the lists of high school graduates in Punsk from 1959-1995 was compared to the ranking lists of given names used in Poland and Lithuania. This enabled some observations concerning the choice of names by Polish Lithuanians. It appears that Lithuanian anthroponymy plays an important role in consolidating the Lithuanian minority in Poland, and that it can be viewed in terms of an in-group code. At the same time, the parallel use of two language versions of given names - Polish and Lithuanian - allows for the selection of the form depending on the communicative situation.