Assessing the Resilience of Case Morphology in a Heritage Dialect of Polish Spoken in Brazil

The article presents an analysis of case morphology in the Cruz Machado dialect, a heritage dialect of Polish spoken in a municipality in the Brazilian state of Paraná. The analysis uses transcripts of interviews conducted in Cruz Machado in 2018 with 30 dialect speakers aged 33–81 (Zaremba 2023) and examines 402 NPs, 81 personal pronouns, and 116 nominal borrowings from Portuguese. The results point to a high degree of morphological resilience, with baseline matching reaching 98% for NPs and 97% for pronouns. Portuguese-origin nouns display reduced morphological adaptation of nearly 89%. These numbers are notable considering the dialect’s century-long development in relative isolation, a historical lack of institutional support for minority languages, and the likely imminent shift to Portuguese as the dominant community language. The analysis focuses on the possible fine-grained restructuring, like the representation of the dative, the resilience of the genitive of negation, and case marking in the oblique position.