Dialect is the speech of the oral environment based on oral intergenerational transmission. The orality of dialects and their ?history? reduced to the level of three generations (ME: PARENTS: GRANDPARENTS) has a clear impact on dialectal word formation, the description of which must take into account mechanisms other than those developed for analogous phenomena in the literary language. In the article, these issues have been indicated in pertinent maps and in excerpts from lexical corpora compiled on the basis of contemporary recordings (2001-2020) of several hours of conversations with numerous inhabitants of selected villages (about 50 people). In turn, the material obtained in the years 1985-1995 from the dialects of the Lublin region provided the grounds for examining the vitality of word formation in the dialectal environment, as well as the existence of borrowed elements in the linguistic borderland.