Pūnckas / Punskas / Puńsk dialect dictionary

Vaina’s Lexicon is a dictionary of the Lithuanian minority dialect in Poland. The dictionary includes lexical material gathered and written down on flashcards by Juozas Vaina (Józef Vaina) between the 1960s and the 1990s.

The flashcards (of which there were around 6000) were given to Jowita Niewulis-Grablunas by Juozas Vaina’s daughter – Marytė Vainaitė-Misiukonienė (Maria Misiukanis), to whom the Lexicon’s editors are extremely grateful.

Juozas Vaina was born in 1916 in the village of Widugiery, died in 2011 in Puńsk. He was a teacher, an ethnographer, a folklorist and the founder of the Punskas Ethnographic Museum. As of right now, said museum is named after him.

The interactive Vaina`s Lexicon is available here.