What We can learn from the Comparative dictionary of three villages in Małopolska by Marian Kucała and its topical arrangement

Marian Kucała’s 1957 Comperative dictionary of three villages in Malopolska is the best-known dialect dictionary arranged by topic. It presents a comprehensive analysis of lexical material from Więciórka, a village in the Myślenice district which is currently considered as belonging to the Kliszczak dialect area. The collected material was compared with the local varieties spoken in two other villages of Małopolska, which made it possible among others to identify those lexical items that are unique to Więciórka. The current article aims to col-lect and analyse the information that Kucała’s dictionary supplies on this Kliszczak variety, so as to show its richness and diversity that still existed relatively recently. The analysis is equally based on the overall structure of the dictionary, the types of entries it contains, as well as various indexes included therein, such as the register of proper names pertain-ing to the village, or the list of lexemes not used by the inhabitants of Więciórka who only speak the local variety. To this end, the author has undertaken a semantic classification of alphabetically arranged lexical items, both those unique to this variety and those alien to it. The research discussed here may therefore become a starting point for further comparative analyses of the vocabulary of contemporary Kliszczak varieties.