The main purpose of this article is to present how geographical names (microtoponyms) acquire slang names. The site of inquiry is the area of Wręczyca Wielka, which contains the names of different physiographic objects, e. g. fields, meadows, forests, paths. The data was collected from 2011 to 2015 during the informal utterances of the oldest and middle generations of the inhabitants of the area. The analysis also contains the justifications for the microtoponyms. The linguistic material was collected in the area near Kłobuck in the north of the Silesian Province. The first part of this article is devoted to the main transformation of the Polish rural areas after 1945. The latter parts of the text present e.g. the fact that microtoponyms sustain phonetic slang features which do not exist in contemporary slang, and the fact that geographical names are one of the elements of folk culture, as well as the link between the former and contemporary folk image.

Connection of etymology and dialect lexicography is bilateral: progress of etymological investigations leads to the analysis of dialectal vocabulary, and composition of the dictionary of many / all dialects of some language requires standardization of initial records. Standardization presupposes removal of specific dialectal structural / phonetic modifications and consideration of the history of language. So, the attraction to etymological analysis of dialect words is useful and even inevitable. The author offers possible solutions of these methodological problems.

One of the diffi culties of Slavic etymology which also occur in works devoted to the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic vocabulary, is the problem associated with distinguishing words, with an identical or similar sound, of native origin, and borrowings. The article considers four situations of this kind. The reconstruction of the allegedly Proto-Slavic word *kova one adduced the dialectal Croatian kȏva ‘quarry’, whereas it is a local phonetic variant of the well-attested noun kȃva ‘quarry; pit, trench; mine’, borrowed from the Italian (and Venetian) cava ‘quarry; mine; pit; cave rn’. Among the descendants of the Proto-Slavic *kojiti ‘to soothe, to alleviate’ one included the dialectal Croatian kojȉti ‘to wind a rope, to haul in a net’, whereas it is a fi shing term borrowed from the dialectal Italian coir ‘to wind a rope’; in this context one considered the dialectal Kajkavian Croatian kojiti ‘to breast-feed; to cultivate, to nourish’ (which heretofore was unfamiliar to Croatian scholarship), the actual descendant of the Proto-Slavic *kojiti. The dialectal Croatian lȕća ‘a lump of earth’ was said to be derived from the earlier *glut-ja from the Proto-Slavic *gluta ‘a dense lump of something; protuberance; knag’, whereas the geography indicates that it is more likely a Romance borrowing which is etymologically related to the Latin luteum ‘mud’. In this context one considered the Čakavian lȕća ‘skull’ and ‘a species of a nocturnal moth (death’s head hawkmoth, Acherontia atropos), which is probably related with this Romance borrowing. Apart from the unquestionable Proto-Slavic *klǫpь ‘bench’ one also reconstructed the proto-forms *klupь *klupa, whereas the Slavic words, which were supposed to indicate original forms featuring the root -u- are borrowings from German: Kashubian klëpa ‘a sandbank which protrudes above the sea level’ from the German Klippe ‘coastal rock’, Croatian klupa ‘an instrument which is used to measure the diameter of a tree trunk’ from the German Kluppe, which has the same meaning in the technical language.

The text is an overview of the first volume of the lexical atlas of the Russian folk dialects. It presents modern cartographic methods used in the volume and types of maps contained therein. In order to better present the volume, one exemplary map is analysed, indicating its advantages and drawbacks. In conclusion the richness of the Russian dialectal lexical material, which was precisely geographically located, is stressed. This is the biggest merit of the atlas.