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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Polish music producer Sw@da – who is competing to become Poland’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest as part of a duo with Polish singer Niczos – has been placed by Belarus on its list of “extremists”.
The pair have also attracted a lot of attention and discussion in Poland in recent weeks for their decision to sing their Eurovision entry in a mix of languages and dialects from a region of Poland where Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian are spoken.
The Instagram profile of the Polish artist Sw@da ended up on Lukashenka's list of "extremists."
As usual, the regime did not explain why the musician from Podlasie, who will perform at the Eurovision pre-selection in three days, ended up there
Source: euroradio, photo:… pic.twitter.com/76iPMIyXCr
— Belsat in English (@Belsat_Eng) February 11, 2025
Belsat, a Poland-based media outlet focused on Belarus, reported this week that the Instagram account of Sw@da, whose real name is Wiktor Szczygieł, has been added to Belarus’s extremism list. No reason for the decision was given.
Sw@da has pioneered a form of music that he calls “Podlasie Bounce”, blending modern electronic music with traditional folk elements from Podlasie, a historical region (also called Podlachia in English) in northeast Poland that sits alongside the modern-day border with Belarus.
The area has long been home to significant numbers of ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians, and some people there speak a tongue known as Podlachian, which is variously described as a language, a microlanguage, or as a dialect of Belarusian or Ukrainian.
According to Poland’s most recent census, taken in 2021, over 3,500 people in Podlasie indicated that they speak a “Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian dialect” at home, notes the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.
This year, Sw@da has teamed up with regular collaborator Niczos (real name Nikola Jurczuk) in a bid to become Poland’s entry in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. The final selection from ten candidates will take place tomorrow, 14 February.
Their song, titled “Lusterka”, is sung in a blend of local languages and dialects. Its lyrics tell the story of someone facing a crisis due to being negatively judged by other people in their village.
“We are showing that Poland is not homogeneous,” Niczos told Gazeta Wyborcza. “Borderlands are interesting places because different cultures mix there. We want to unite, not divide – to show that we can all live together…[and] have fun together.”
The work has drawn a lot of attention in Poland, with almost 700,000 views on YouTube since it was posted a month ago. The reaction has largely been positive, with the video drawing over 21,000 “likes” and only 839 “dislikes” on the platform.
The most-liked comment under the video is by a user who says that they are from Podlasie and “used to be ashamed of my dialect but now I am proud of it…It is part of our cultural identity”.
“There are so many minorities in Poland,” they continued. “Poland is a multicultural country, and it is worth appreciating that instead of taking the easy way out and singing in English.”
Speaking to Gazeta Wyborcza, Sw@da said that they have “received a lot of positive messages. People write that their grandparents spoke Podlachian. Thanks to this [song], they are returning to their identity and roots”.
The president’s decision to veto a law recognising Silesian as a language has reignited a debate that is ostensibly linguistic but at its heart is a struggle over culture, identity and, for some, the integrity of the Polish state itself https://t.co/HNgQ2436G7
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 9, 2024
The newspaper notes, however, that there have also been negative comments on social media, with some users accusing the song of representing the “Ukrainisation of Poland”, a country that has seen mass immigration by Ukrainians in recent years.
One widely shared post on social media platform X claimed that Russia is behind efforts to “create the idea of a microlanguage” in Podlasie and argued that what is presented in the song is not authentic at all.
“Leftists love ‘traditions’ only when they are artificial and violate normal ones,” wrote the user. A similar claim about the song’s lack of authenticity was made by Rafał Otoka Frąckiewicz, a right-wing commentator, in a post that has been liked over 2,700 times.
Ok, czyli wychodzi na to, że rosjanie – wiadomo po co – tworzą idee "mikroęzyka". Podchytuje ją polski Białorusin, a efekt jego pracy przejmuje Polka, która z tą "tradycją" nie ma nic wspólnego i całego "mikrojęzyka" uczy sie niemal od zera. Ten cudzysłowów to dlatego, że jak… pic.twitter.com/mfRWZsmNI6
— Szymon Woźniak (@SzymonIgoronco) January 18, 2025
Gazeta Wyborcza also reports that many positive comments in response to the song have come from Belarusian social media users. Belarus was itself expelled from the European Broadcasting Union, and therefore Eurovision, in 2021. The newspaper suggests that this may explain Minsk’s decision to take action against Sw@da.
Meanwhile, activists who try to promote Podlachian have expressed their pleasure at the attention it is now receiving.
“For 20 years, I failed to introduce the Podlachian language into the mainstream, and now it’s been done thanks to one song,” Jan Maksymiuk, a Polish journalist and translator of Belarusian ethnicity, told Gazeta Wyborcza.
He previously created a grammatical description of the language and is currently working on a dictionary that already has over 22,000 words in it. Maksymiuk also argues that census data are unreliable and estimates that around 50,000 people in the region use Podlachian.
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: swadaniczos.art
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
