Jan Fellerer's monograph presents an intriguing study of multilingual L΄viv during the late Habsburg period (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The focus is on morpho-syntactic features that were typical of the city's non-standard Polish variety. About one third of the book is devoted to a discussion of Polish- and Ukrainian language sources (Introduction) and a historical-sociolinguistic view of the topic (Chapters 1 and 2). The larger part offers grammatical analyses of twelve “Distinct Morpho-Syntactic Characteristics of L΄viv Borderland Polish” (93–252). “Conclusions and Prospects” (253–261) are followed by a good bibliography and an index.

Regarding the discussion of the sources used for this book, it is highly understandable that they cover not only the late Habsburg, but also the interwar period. Still, it comes as a surprise that despite the book's title, more attention is devoted to materials (primarily satirical texts) from the latter period.

Chapter 1 offers an interesting overview of the city's historical languages, with a careful analysis of census data. Some issues are debatable: For instance, it is only partly true that “the Austrian authorities and others employed” the “historically polysemous glotto-and ethnonym” Ruthenians “in a bid to dissimilate them from the Ukrainians to the east under Russian rule” (26); rather, Galician Ukrainians themselves adopted their new name only gradually. Probably following instructions on the part of the publishers, Fellerer transliterated Ruthenian/Ukrainian Cyrillic sources and thus faced rather unnecessary problems: the transliteration “Mnoga lěta! pane pisar'!” instead of “Mnoha lěta! pane pysar'!” is not convincing (35). Generally, some transliterations “as for Russian” are disputable as the texts are not written in Russian properly. For similar reasons, the spelling въ карманѣ in a mixed text of that period does not necessarily entail that the ending should not be interpreted as phonetic [i] (41). A number of minor issues raise doubts: the form jeshche is not a lexical Russianism, but widespread in southwestern Ukrainian dialects. The lexical stem of vozopiimo is not Russian, but markedly Church Slavonic and as such a possible loan in Ukrainian too. The expression poshli v otstavku (43) is not “morphologically slavonicized or Russianized Ukrainian”; it is simply Russian.

Information on languages other than Polish and Ukrainian remains rather scarce. Although this is partly understandable because of the overall structure of the book, particularly Yiddish, would probably have deserved greater attention.

In Chapter 2, “Patterns of Bi- and Multilingualism,” Fellerer presents multilingual portraits of “Yiddish-speaking Lvivians,” “Ukrainian-Speaking Lvivians,” and “Polish-Speaking Lvivians,” drawing conclusions first and foremost from court and police records. Some conclusions raise doubts: do isolated German intrusions in Polish-language records such as Verlobung, Verdienst really testify to the fact that a Yiddish-speaker who appears in a document of 1893 “clearly employed German for some cases” (59)? Can a brief Polish-language fragment with a number of serious grammatical deviations really be characterized as “competent, yet not entirely correct Polish” (63)? Generally, Fellerer's outline suggests that Polish-speakers’ multilingualism basically came down to the coexistence of standard Polish and L΄viv Borderland Polish (LBP; Polszczyzna kresowa), and the question of German. This might be true for the majority of Polish-speakers, but it is hard to believe that all those who were in regular contact with Ukrainian-speakers did not have at least some limited command of this language. Exceptions were probably more frequent than one might believe at first glance: the Galician Russophile leader Ivan Naumovič was purportedly proficient in Yiddish. Incidentally, if a Polish-speaker's German-language oral text has the expression mit alle Restaurater und Cafeties this does not necessarily entail a bad command of German, as it is fully in accordance with dialectal usage.

Chapter 3 offers an in-depth analysis of grammatical features that are described as typical of L΄viv Borderland Polish in the following twelve spheres: 1-participal verb forms and pro-drop, predication in the present tense, gender agreement, subjects of impersonal verb forms, subjects of reflexive verb forms, infinitival predicates, participial predicates, predicate case, accusative of negation, genitive-accusative case variation in verbal complements, quantified nouns, and, finally, relative clauses. The most convincing of these features have been described as typical not solely of LBP, but of the southeastern variant of Borderland Polish or even Borderland Polish as such (including the northeastern variant of modern Belarus and Lithuania) for a long time. Although Fellerer is aware of that, it remains unclear to which degree these features make up precisely the essence of L΄viv's urban dialect as such. Regardless, in these sections Fellerer presents some interesting linguistic arguments that deserve to be discussed more broadly elsewhere. His “chief question” is whether the elements he discussed were “borrowed from Ukrainian, or the result of a dialect-internal development (or an archaic retention), or, in fact, a combination of the two” (231). The major conclusion is that genuine borrowings from Ukrainian are quite rare (231), whereas internal development occurred more often, and in most cases “Ukrainian influence increased the productivity of an existing, yet constrained morpho-syntactic structure” (232). The major grammatical arguments are summarized on 232–37, while the final section, “Conclusions and Prospects,” raises a number of new issues, including lexicological ones.

Altogether, this book is an interesting contribution to Polish linguistics and the study of mutual Slavic language contacts.