You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (February 2019) Click for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,220 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at :ru:Полещуки; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Полещуки}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Poleshuks

Poleshuks from Kobryn (1916)
Regions with significant populations
Ukraine	9,000[1][2]
Belarus	14,000[3]
Languages
West Polesian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian
Religion
Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Belarusians, Ukrainians, Podlashuks

The Poleshuks,^[1] also known as Polesians (Ukrainian: поліщуки, romanized: polishchuky, Belarusian: палешукі, romanized: paleshuki, Russian: полещуки, romanized: poleshchuki) are the indigenous population of Polesia (also known as Polesie and Polissia).^[1] Their native speech forms a dialect continuum between the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages and includes recently codified West Polesian, as well as many local variations and sub-dialects.^[4]

Historyedit

Since the interbellum, the Poleshuks started developing a sense of identity, influenced by the ethnic politics of the Second Polish Republic within the Polesie Voivodeship.^[5] The voivodship had the sparsest population and among the lowest levels of prosperity, due to its adverse climatic and agricultural (soil) conditions. A 1923 Polish statistical document said that 38.600 of 880.900 of population in Polesie Voivodeship (about 4%) were identified as Polezhuks, who self-identified their ethnicity in the census as tutejszy ("local"). The document noted that they were using East Slavic dialects, transitional between Ukrainian and Belarusian, sometimes identified as a separate Polesian language. In the 1931 Polish Census the question about ethnicity was replaced with the question about mother tongue. As a result, 62.5% of population identified their language as tutejszy ("local"). (14.5% declared Polish and 10.0% declared Yiddish or Hebrew as mother tongue.) That some respondents declared their language as Belarusian or Ukrainian was interpreted as the formation of the corresponding ethnic consciousness in the area.^[6] Currently the ethnic group of Poleshuks is considered one of the distinct cultural and ethnic identities in the area, while most of the population of the Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian parts of the region of Polesie have assimilated with the respective nations, as well as with Russian ethnos.^[1]

At the end of the 1980s, there was a minor campaign in Soviet Byelorussia for the creation of a standard written language for the dialect based on the dialects of Polesia launched by Belarusian writer Nikolai Shelyagovich and his associates as part of his activities for the recognition of Poleshuks as a separate ethnicity and for their autonomy. However, they received almost no support and the campaign eventually melted away.^[7]

See alsoedit

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Poleshuks.

• Polekhs
• Podlashuks
• Tutejszy

Referencesedit

This article about ethnicity is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e