Statistics / Speakers’ traits

For a long time it was estimated that the Polish parts of Orava and Spiš were inhabited by about 10–20 thousand Slovaks who spoke local dialects (Moskal 2004: 11Moskal 2004: 11 / komentarz/comment/r /
Moskal, Marta 2004. Policy on Minority and Regional Languages in Poland. Uniwersytet Jagielloński. URL:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/mercator/images/Martapaper.pdf [dostęp: 25.09.2012 r.]
).
According to the official Hungarian census created between the XIX and XX centuries, in which Polish people were assigned Slovak nationality, the proportion of various nationalities in the Spiš region presented itself as following:

Nationality	1869 r.	1900 r.	1910 r.
Slovaks	50,4%	58,2%	58,0%
Germans	35,0%	25,0%	25,0%
Ruthenes	13,8%	8,4%	8,0%
Hungarians	0,7%	6,0%	6,0%

Other censuses from that time assigned nationality on the basis of native language of the population.
According to the Czechoslovak census from the year 1921, announced six years later – in 1927, at time in the region there were 24 000 people speaking Polish, 18 650 German, 12 300 Russian and 3400 Slovak. According to Małecki (1938Małecki 1938 / komentarz/comment/r /
Małecki, Mieczysław 1938. Język polski na południe od Karpat (Spisz, Orawa, Czadeckie, Wyspy językowe). Zakopane: Geberthner i Wolff. URL: http://mbc.malopolska.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=57719 [dostęp: 06.10.2012 r.]
) 70% of population spoke Polish language in the second half of the Interwar Period.
Highlanders from Polish Spiš speak mainly Polish Spiš dialects, but when speaking with visitors, they tend to use general (colloquial) language or at least use some phrases from general language.

Number of speakers

The inhabitants of Spiš region use Spiš dialect natively. This is also true for people of Slovak descent (Moskal 2004: 2Moskal 2004: 2 / komentarz/comment/r /
Moskal, Marta 2004. Policy on Minority and Regional Languages in Poland. Uniwersytet Jagielloński. URL:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/mercator/images/Martapaper.pdf [dostęp: 25.09.2012 r.]
).
Most of the speakers use Spiš dialect daily since their birth and in many cases it replaced Polish and Slovak (Moskal 2004: 7Moskal 2004: 2 / komentarz/comment/r /
Moskal, Marta 2004. Policy on Minority and Regional Languages in Poland. Uniwersytet Jagielloński. URL:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/mercator/images/Martapaper.pdf [dostęp: 25.09.2012 r.]
).
Lack of information about monolingual inhabitants of the region. It is assumed that all of the speakers of Spiš dialect use also Polish or Slovak language.

Other languages

The inhabitants of Spiš region speak Polish and Slovak (on both sides of the border) and also Czech and Romani (users of the latter partially belong to a separate group). Older inhabitants of the region speak Hungarian to some extent.