Dialect vs. language
at a Lutheran cemetery in
Střítež near
Český Těšín. The inscription, which says "Rest in Peace", is in the Cieszyn Silesian dialect. , a district of
Katowice: "Founders of this cross, landowners from the municipality of Bogucice, 1887". In modern Standard Silesian it would be written as follows:
Fundatorzi tego krziża / Posiedziciele grōntu z gminy boguckij in
Katowice. "We want Silesia, where every boy can take a vow to his chosen one in the Silesian language." , Poland. The text notifies readers that people under the age of 18 will not be served alcohol.
Politicization Opinions are divided among
linguists regarding whether Silesian is a distinct language, a dialect of Polish, or, in the case of
Lach, a variety of Czech. The issue can be contentious, because some Silesians consider themselves to be a distinct nationality within Poland. When Czechs, Poles, and Germans each made claims to substantial parts of Silesia as constituting an integral part of their respective
nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries, the language of Slavic-speaking Silesians became politicized.
Rudolf Abicht, a Slavicist of Upper Silesian extraction who worked at the University of Breslau and proposed an early standardization of the
Belarusian language, clearly recognized that standardizing and making Silesian into a language is a socio-political process. In 1920, he expressed his opinion on the subject in an extensive essay on the 'Upper Silesian language question.' Some, like
Óndra Łysohorsky (a poet and author in
Czechoslovakia), saw the
Silesians as their own distinct people, which culminated in his effort to create a
literary standard which he called the "Lachian language". Silesian inhabitants supporting the cause of each of these ethnic groups had their own robust network of supporters across Silesia's political borders which shifted over the course of the 20th century prior to the large-scale
ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of
World War II. In 2009, Wojciech Janicki argued that the issue is centred around political considerations, and linguistic arguments represent a post-hoc rationalization for political stances. He stated that the arguments given by linguists who oppose recognizing Silesian a language often "support the thesis of the presence of a separate Silesian language quite unintentionally and accidentally". Janicki brings up the examples of Polish ethnologist
Krzysztof Kwaśniewski who stated that "national language is what people speaking it claim and not what linguists judge", and linguist
Bogusław Wyderka, who "demonstrates that for 95 per cent of Silesians, their dialect is their primary code, so it exists as a means of identification". In 2016, Kamusella argued that the reason for politicization of the Silesian debate is that a part of the Polish
national myth is ethnolinguistic homogeneity, one which recognizing Silesians and/or their language as separate from Polish endangers:
Views Some linguists from Poland, such as Jolanta Tambor, Juan Lajo,
Tomasz Wicherkiewicz, philosopher Jerzy Dadaczyński, sociologist Elżbieta Anna Sekuła, and sociolinguist
Tomasz Kamusella, support its status as a language. According to Stanisław Rospond, it is impossible to classify Silesian as a dialect of the contemporary Polish language because he considers it to be descended from
Old Polish. Although often, this view is contested with the fact that during the time of Old Polish, the West Slavic regions didn't classify as separate languages, and rather fell into a dialect continuum such as
Serbo-Croatian, with Silesian still being different from other dialect regions of the time. According to Kamusella, "between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, several popular Silesian-Polish dictionaries were published, some of which were quite extensive. Initially, they referred to Silesian as a gwara (dialect) but then increasingly termed it a language." Kamusella also wrote: "During the first decade of the 21st century Silesian was accepted as a language by most of its speakers in Poland, and also by linguists and IT specialists outside Poland." Other Polish linguists, such as
Jan Miodek and
Edward Polański, do not support its status as a language. Jan Miodek and
Dorota Simonides, prefer to see the preservation of the entire range of Silesian dialects rather than
standardization, stating due to its connection with Old Polish, it should not be classified separately. However, with such classification as Jan Miodek uses, taking into account the first "Polish" sentence was found in Silesia, this argument can also be used to call Polish a dialect of Silesian, and even easier with this criteria, viewing
Spanish a dialect of
Catalan. The German linguist
Reinhold Olesch was greatly interested in the "Polish vernaculars" of Upper Silesia and other Slavic
varieties such as
Kashubian and
Polabian. Miodek argues that "there is no major grammatical feature within Silesian, which would not function simultaneously in the dialects of Lesser Poland or Greater Poland, Mazovian or Kashubian". In their respective surveys of Slavic languages, linguists writing in English such as Alexander M. Schenker, and Robert A. Rothstein, and Roland Sussex and Paul Cubberley listed Silesian as a dialect of Polish in 1993, as did
Encyclopædia Britannica. On the question of whether Silesian is a separate Slavic language,
Gerd Hentschel wrote in 2001 that "Silesian ... can thus ... without doubt be described as a dialect of Polish" (""). Since late 2000s, international classifications towards Silesian shifted - in 2007, the
US Library of Congress recognized Silesian as a regional language, and
SIL International codified it as a new language. In 2011, the
European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages recommended that Poland recognizes Silesian as a language. Dialectologist Jadwiga Wronicz argued that Silesian is a dialect of Polish as this status had been attributed to it at the beginning of the 20th century during research to determine the area of the Polish language. She wrote: "The boundaries between Polish dialects and the dialects of neighbouring languages were defined at the beginning of the 20th century on the basis of intralinguistic features, based on research into the speech of the indigenous population." A similar argument was advanced by the linguist
Andrzej Markowski, who stated that the conclusions reached by the 19th-century linguists
Jerzy Samuel Bandtkie and
Lucjan Malinowski who described Silesian as a variety of Polish should be maintained. In this context, 53% of the lexemes characteristic of Silesian also appear in,
Lesser Polish,
Greater Polish and
Masovian dialects, as well as in the
Kashubian language, which is referred to as a dialect in the study. This result was interpreted as evidence both for and against Silesian being an independent language. Polish linguist
Bogusław Wyderka proposed to recognize Silesian as a
microlanguage, writing: "Due to its origins and systemic-lexical properties, the Silesian ethnolect is a dialect of the Polish language, but one which in terms of functional development has transcended the boundaries of a dialect, at least in the industrial subregion. Standardisation efforts indicate that it is moving towards a form that I have termed a microlanguage." He argues that because Silesian had expanded into film, theatre, television, radio and computer games, and had also become "the material for a variety of literary genres, including high literature such as
Letters from Rome () by
Zbigniew Kadłubek", it is necessary to speak of "new linguistic formations that have transcended the definitional boundaries of dialect". In Czechia, disagreement exists concerning the
Lach dialects which rose to prominence thanks to
Óndra Łysohorsky and his translator
Ewald Osers. While some have considered it a separate language, most now view Lach as a dialect of Czech.
Comparison to other Slavic languages == Phonology ==