A language that forgot itself : essay on the curious non-existence of German as a recognized minority language in today’s Poland
Abstract
This essay draws on my almost three decades worth of research on the multiethnic and multilingual history of Upper Silesia during the last two centuries, when various ethnolinguistic nationalisms have radically altered the ethnic, political, demographic and linguistic shape of the region. I focus on the German minority that was recognized in Poland in the early 1990s. This recognition was extended to the German language. However, though in official statistics there are hundreds of schools with German, and bilingual signage amply dots the Upper Silesian landscape, neither in the region nor elsewhere in Poland is there a single, however small, locality where German would be the language of everyday communication. With this essay I attempt to explicate this irony of official recognition on the one hand, and the tacitly enforced non-existence on the ground, on the other hand.
Citation
Kamusella , T D 2014 , ' A language that forgot itself : essay on the curious non-existence of German as a recognized minority language in today’s Poland ' , Sprawy Narodowościowe / Nationalities Affairs , vol. 45 . https://doi.org/10.11649/sn.2014.021
Publication
Sprawy Narodowościowe / Nationalities Affairs
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1230-1698Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright (c) 2014 Tomasz Kamusella. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, provided that the article is properly cited.
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