The language they spoke and are still used by Boykos in the Ukrainian Carpathians is included in the Ukrainian dialect. They belong to the South-West Ukrainian dialect, similarly to the Lemko dialect, and similarly to the Lemko dialect, they are included in the group of the Carpathian languages. These dialects belong to the spoken languages, the folk languages. At this point, it should be noted that the issue of the Boyko speech is also ambiguous here. The Bojkowszczyzna, which stretches for about 200 kilometers, bordering on other ethnographic groups (Lemkos, Hutsuls, Pogórzanie, Dolinianie), was subject to numerous linguistic influences. In the context of the speech used by Boykos, there is talk of "local transitional and mixed dialects". As Oskar Kolberg wrote:
Ruthenians exist in one class of people, that is, in the rural population; their language thus became a peasant dialect. Languages of this genre can no longer be kept clean, because without writing and printing, they have nothing to define and confirm their characteristic existence. by Lithuania, was an independent state, and the Ruthenian language, as the written sources prove, was the “accounting language.” O. Kolberg, Origin and Seats, (in :) O Kolberg Dzieła All vol. 56, Polskie, Wrocław Poznań: 1974.

The text comes from the study "INVENTORY OF CULTURAL RESOURCES OF THE BORDERLAND - THE ETHNOCARPATHIA PROJECT" realized by the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University for the District Museum in Rzeszów.

Author: Mrs. Helena Urbanczyk.