The Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) has published a book by Helena Grochola-Szczepanek “Conversations in Spisz. An anthology of Polish dialect texts’. The publication is a record of living speech used by contemporary inhabitants of the region. 

The book is based on recorded interviews with respondents in 2015-2018. As the Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences emphasises, the idea of the study is to record authentic utterances with all the elements resulting from spontaneity and non-fluency of speech and dialect pronunciation. 

The texts are written in the Polish spelling, but retain a dialect sound. This form of notation facilitates the use of the study by any reader, and not only by a narrow group of specialists familiar with phonetic transcription. 

Along with the book, readers receive access to the audio files on which the texts were based. The entire book is preceded by an introduction discussing speech research in the region, the characteristics of the Spiš dialect and the rules of transcription.