Tutejszy

Tutejszy was a self-identification of Eastern European rural populations, who did not have a clear national identity. The term means "from here", "local" or "natives". Linguistically, the term is closely associated with speakers of the so-called prostaya mova ('simple speech'), an uncodified vernacular based on Belarusian dialects with influences from Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian. This phenomenon was mostly present in mixed-lingual Eastern European areas, including Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia, in particular, in Polesia and Podlachia. As a self-identification, it persisted in Lithuania’s Vilnius Region into the late 20th century. For example, in 1989, a poll of persons whose passports recorded their ethnicity as Polish revealed that 4% of them regarded themselves as tuteišiai, 10% as Lithuanians, and 84% as Poles.