Silesian between Polish and German, between autochthonous dialects and Polish standard. Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of a twofold linguistic hybridization

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan Patrick Zeller
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392222529

The Polish-Silesian dialects of Upper Silesia are today vital like only few other varieties in the Polish dialectal continuum. Historically and currently, they are characterized by language contact: first with German, today with standard Polish.As part of the historical region Silesia, Upper Silesia has for centuries been a bridge between “German” and “Polish”. This contact has left linguistic traces in the autochthonous Polish dialects of this area – in “Silesian” – mainly in vocabulary, but also in (morpho-)syntax. Despite of a large number of impressionistic descriptions, the intensity and extensity of these traces of historical contact between Polish and German in today’s Silesian have been shown only inadequately empirically.After the Second World War, in its eastern regions already after the First World War, the Polish standard language assumed the dominant position in the language architecture of Upper Silesia. Even if Silesian is considered to be vital and efforts are being made to develop it, Silesian is, in the course of the general European development towards the standard languages, i.e. the abandoning of dialects and / or their convergence with the standard languages, under the influence of standard Polish. This is especially true for the urban landscape of Upper Silesia, the Upper Silesian industrial district, where the development of new urban subvarieties, new urban dialects can be expected. However, the actually used Silesian between autochthonous dialects and standard Polish has not yet been investigated with the instruments of modern, variational dialectology.The aim of the proposed project is to examine the linguistic consequences of this “double hybridization” through historical and current language and dialect contact. It is divided into two aspects: 1) a variational linguistic study of Silesian on the basis of a corpus of family conversations to be compiled in the Upper Silesian industrial district; 2) a study of the psycholinguistic correlates of linguistic variation in Silesian in different speaker groups. For the first time, a quantitatively and qualitatively comprehensive data collection on Silesian which goes beyond a description of “interesting phenomena” is aimed at. An innovative feature of the project is the combination of sociolinguistic variational linguistics and psycholinguistics, so that the project also promises to contribute to the theory formation in these both areas.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants