The aim of the article is to bring closer a part of the world’s image that is characteristic for the rural community and the richness and variety of the folk culture inscribed in the proprial structures. As a result, this subject requires an integration of different research methods elaborated within the fields of onomastics and dialectology, including linguistic methods of researching a lingual image of the world. The onymic material is as follows: appellative surnames, originating from nicknames formed from dialectal lexemes, surnames motivated by nominal, dialectal hypocorisms, and finally, surnames formed from matronymic phrases (female names), which are an example of an aberrance of the patriarchal family model. Phonetic and formative phenomena should also be focused upon. These are crucial for certain social micro-communities, and are inscribed in the dialectal inflexions of anthroponyms (which function as separate surnames) and marginally in the female surnames with dialectal formants. Onyms with dialectal motivation refer to, and indirectly point, to the contemporary user, the past realities of living in the village community and the lingual and cultural background.

This article examines the problem of the significance of literature, not just folk literature, in Ryszard Berwiński's Studies in Folk Literature from the Historical and the Scholarly Perspective, published in Poznań in 1854. This subject was largely marginalized in discussions of this magisterial work because of what could seem as the author's inordinate preoccupation with demonology. This article looks again at his approach, which deserves a reappraisal. The discussion is divided into three parts. The first part examines the terms used by Berwiński to describe folk literature and texts that are connected with it in various ways, which for him and other 19th‑century researches constituted the essence of folklore. The second part focuses on those types of texts Berwiński regarded as crucial for the study of the sources of folk belief, while the third reviews his vision of the cultural and social role of literature in the 19th century. Together, these analyses reconstruct Berwiński's view on the functioning of literature in folklore studies and, more broadly, in the processes of the creation of a communal identity.