Silesian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a language caught in the net of conflicting nationalisms, politics, and identities

Abstract

A probe into the changing perceptions and classifications of Silesian (i.e. the Slavic dialect and the Slavic-Germanic creole of Upper Silesia, or both construed as the ethnolect of the Silesians) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as most saliently influenced by the mutually nullifying competition of German and Polish ethnolinguistic nationalisms. This competition opened the space for the rise of the Silesian national-cum-regional movement, which sometimes undertook the task of codifying a Silesian language. Such codifications were frustrated during the periods of dictatorship and totalitarianism, which lasted in Upper Silesia from 1926/1933 to 1989. Berlin and Warsaw suppressed the possibility of the rise of a Silesian language, perceived as an ideological threat to the ethnolinguistic legitimization of German and Polish national statehood. Today, Warsaw dislikes the recent popular grassroots project to codify Silesian as a language, but, under the democratic conditions enjoyed in postcommunist Poland, the state administration has no legal means to suppress this project. The codification of Silesian gathered pace at the turning of the twenty-first century, due, among other reasons, to the rapid spread of access to the Internet. However, without the state's blessing and support, the outcome of the codification project, remains, at best, uncertain.

Keywords:

• Silesian language
• Silesians
• Germany
• Poland
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alexander Maxwell, Anna Gąsior-Niemiec, Michael O'Gorman, the anonymous reviewers, and Florian Bieber for discussion and advice. Obviously, I alone remain responsible for any errors or infelicities. The first draft of this paper was presented during the conference on National “Languages” through Historians’ Eyes, held at New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania, June 25-26, 2007.

Notes

The Silesians are an ethnic group who emerged in the second half of the 19th century in the overwhelmingly Slavophone areas of central and eastern Upper Silesia, then within the frontiers of Prussia. Additionally, due to the Catholic character of the population, importantly, the coalescence of the group was limited to the region's area overlapping with the territory of the Diocese of Breslau (Wrocław). (In the region's southernmost section included in the Archdiocese of Olmütz [Olomouc], the ethnic group of Morawecs, or Moravians, emerged.) With the advent of popular elementary education in German and the rise of the industrial basin in their region, a diglossia set in. Within their communities, Silesians communicated in their local Slavic dialect, Silesian; in church, they developed a passive command of standard Polish; while at school and in contacts with state bureaucracy they switched to standard German. The usually imperfect acquisition of German, compounded with the necessity to speak it on an everyday basis in factories and mines, led to the rise of the Slavic-Germanic creole. Due to the increasing ennationalizing pressure exerted on the Silesians after 1918 by Germany and Poland in various sections of Upper Silesia during different periods, many Silesians became Poles or Germans. Until 1989 no self-declared Silesian elite could emerge, because the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Germany and Poland would not have accepted such a development. At 172,000, according to the 2002 census, the Silesians are a minority in their region of over three million inhabitants. Nevertheless, they are the numerically largest minority surviving in today's Poland (Kamusella, Schlonzska mowa 83–125; Kamusella, Silesia and Central European Nationalisms).

As in the case of some failed political projects, the national-cum-linguistic projects of Czechoslovak and Serbocroatoslovenian never materialized as languages in their own right, complete with dictionaries and grammars. There were efforts to this end, especially in the case of Czechoslovak. Nevertheless, both postulated languages played an important political and nation-building role in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia between the two world wars.

At the first occurrence of place-names I employ those forms which were contemporary with the period under discussion, and give the modern forms in parentheses or brackets.

This linguo- and ethnonym of “Lachian” as coined by Łysohorsky stems from the tradition, widespread in eastern Austrian Silesia and the adjacent Moravian areas, of referring to lowlanders as “Lachs.” Originally, this was a pejorative term, but ethnographers (especially Czechs) took it up to denote the area of eastern Austrian Silesian and northern Moravia. Thus, the purely ethnographic concept of “Lachia” was born, with no relation to any historical region. This concept's complete divorce from the past was well-suited to Łysohorsky's ethnolinguistic-cum-political project of building a Lachian nation (Hannan, Borders of Language 65–70).