Usually, Western Poleshuks do not like being involved in any politics,
including issues like that; however, there was a handful of them who claimed
that Western Poleshuks should be recognized as a separate ethnic group
with their own language (the fourth Eastern-Slavic language, along with
Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian). In late 80's, these
people organized a movement called Polisse and published a
local-language newspaper called Zbudinne. They also tried to develop
a standard for the "literary Western-Polessian language". However,
they failed to stir up much enthusiasm among the local people, and the
newspaper was eventually closed.
I do not intend to discuss here if Western Poleshuks are ethnic Belarussians,
or Ukrainians, or a separate group, I just want to give several examples
of the language used in the newspaper Zbudinne. In my opinion, this
language looks somewhat artificial, as if the authors tried to establish
a standard of spelling and usage that should be as different as possible
both from Ukrainian and from Belarussian. Nevertheless, it contains a lot
of specific words and features actually used in the local dialects, and
I believe these examples could be of interest for people studying Slavic
languages.
Example 3 - J.Kraszewski and Pinsk
If you understand Belarussian, I would
recommend an article called "The Modern History of Yatviagi"
by Andrei Dyn'ko published in ARCHE magazine
(thanks a lot to the author for his permission to place it here, and to
Mikola Ramanouski for letting me
know about this article and sending me the text!)
The examples are in GIF files (unfortunately, I am not aware of any
OCR software able to recognize texts in the Western-Polessian language
:-) ).
Disclaimer: Inclusion of the examples below in this Web page
does not necessarily mean my agreement with the views expressed therein.