VARIATION IN PODLACHIAN INSTRUMENTAL SINGULAR ENDINGS: -OJU OR -EJU?

Vratislav  Karpišek

doi:10.21618/fil2633272k

Authors

Vratislav Karpišek Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Slavonic Studies

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21618/fil2633272k

Keywords:

Podlachian, instrumental singular, morphology, language variation, East Slavic, codification, microlanguage

Abstract

This article investigates variation between the instrumental singular endings -oju and -eju in contemporary Podlachian. The phenomenon is examined against the background of East Slavic nominal morphology and analysed on the basis of a corpus of published Podlachian literary texts. Special attention is given to nouns with soft or historically soft stems (masculine and feminine), where the competition between the two endings is most evident. A comparative perspective shows that Podlachian diverges both from Ukrainian, where instrumental endings remain more consistently stem-conditioned, and from Belarusian, which exhibits a pattern of regularization. Corpus evidence indicates that within the set of morphologically eligible variable forms, instrumental singular forms in -oju predominate, while -eju remains morphologically viable. The findings suggest that the distribution of the two endings is no longer governed primarily by phonological criteria, but rather by analogical extension, lexical persistence, and authorial or codificatory preferences. This variation thus represents a systematic feature of contemporary Podlachian morphology and its developing written norm.

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