Abstrakt:
The Old Believers in Poland live in three centres, but only two of them constitute considerably large communities: the Suwałki region and Augustów region. The results of the hitherto carried investigations suggest that there are territorial differences between the shape of interference in both regions. There are two neighbouring homogenous Old Believer villages near Augustów, which are the life centre of this community. People use the traditional Russian dialect in the face-to-face domain, which, according to Weinreich, makes the idiosyncrasies in individual linguistic behaviour cancel each other, and develop socially determined speech habits. There is no speech community based on the Old Believer dialect in the Suwałki region. The Old Believer life concentrates in the town of Suwałki, and the village communities are too small to preserve the dialect, or are inhabited mostly by the Polish majority. On the example of several idiolects, the author illustrates the thesis that the bilingualism and interference of the Old Believers from the Suwałki region are much more individual than their coreligionists living in the surroundings of Augustów.
