Language
The Slavic Silesian language (or often Upper Silesian) is spoken by the Silesian ethnic group or nationality inside Polish Upper Silesia. According to the last census in Poland (2011), some 509,000 people declared Silesian as their native language, however as much as 817,000 people declared to be of Silesian nationality, not necessarily speaking Silesian, even though such nationality has not been recognized by Polish governments since its creation in 1945.
There is some contention over whether Silesian is a dialect or a language in its own right. Most Polish linguists consider Silesian to be a prominent regional dialect of Polish. However, many Silesians regard it as a separate language belonging to the West Slavic branch of Slavic languages, together with Polish and other Lechitic languages, as well as Upper and Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak. In July 2007 the Silesian language was officially recognized by the Library of Congress and SIL International. The language was attributed ISO code: SZL. The first official dictation contest of the Silesian language took place in August 2007.
Although the German Language is still spoken in Silesia, as it has a sizable minority of speakers in the Opole Voivodship in Poland, the vast majority of native speakers were expelled during or after 1945. Therefore the number of speakers of German in the region was radically and significantly decreased after centuries of settlement after the Second World War. The Silesian German dialect is a distinct variety of East Central German, with some West Slavic influence likely caused by centuries of contact between Germans and Slavs in the region and related in some ways to contemporary Saxon. The Silesian German dialect is often referred to as Lower Silesian in the German Language. The usage of this dialect appears to be decreasing, as most German Silesians prefer either Standard German or Polish.
Read more about this topic: Silesian People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)