Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of a double linguistic hybridisation

Sponsor:

• German Research Foundation

Project leader:

• Prof Dr Jan Patrick Zeller

Co-operation partner:

• Prof Dr Jolanta Tambor(Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach)

Collaborators:

• Dr Martin Henzelmann (2018-2022; University of Hamburg, University of Greifswald)
• Victoria Steinfeld-Lidzbarski (2024)
• Dr Maxim Makartsev (2024)

Project description:

The Polish-Silesian dialects of Upper Silesia are preserved alive today like only a few other varieties in the Polish dialect continuum. Historically and currently, they are characterised by language and variety contact: first with German, today with standard Polish. As part of the historical region of Silesia, Upper Silesia was a bridge between "German" and "Polish" for centuries. This contact has left linguistic traces in the autochthonous Polish dialects of this area - in "Silesian" - mainly in the vocabulary, but also in the (morpho-)syntax. Despite a large number of impressionistic descriptions, the intensity and extent of these traces of historical contact between Polish and German in present-day Silesian have not been sufficiently demonstrated empirically, and after the Second World War, and in the eastern areas already after the First World War, the standard Polish language took over the dominant position in the linguistic architecture of Upper Silesia. Even though Silesian is considered vital and there are endeavours to expand Silesian, it is under the influence of standard Polish as part of the general European development towards standard languages, i.e. the abandonment of dialects and / or their convergence with standard languages. This is particularly true for the urban landscape of Upper Silesia, the Upper Silesian industrial area, for which the development of new urban sub-varieties, new urban dialects is to be expected. However, the actual use of Silesian between autochthonous dialects and standard Polish has not yet been investigated using the tools of modern, variationist dialectology, and the aim of the proposed project is to investigate the linguistic consequences of this "double hybridisation" through historical and current language and variety contact. It is divided into two aspects: 1) A variation linguistic study of Silesian on the basis of a corpus of family conversations in the Upper Silesian industrial area; 2) The study of the psycholinguistic correlates of variation in Silesian among different groups of speakers. For the first time, a quantitatively and qualitatively comprehensive collection of data on Silesian is aimed at, which goes beyond a description of "interesting phenomena". An innovative feature of the project is the combination of sociolinguistic variation linguistics and psycholinguistics, so that the project also promises to contribute to the development of theory in both fields.