As is well known, there has been an intense and sometimes emotional debate about Silesian in Poland in recent years. (In line with Polish usage, the term "Silesian / Silesia" is used here to refer to Upper Silesia). It is about the legal recognition of Silesian as a "regional language". After similarly controversial discussions, Kashubian was ultimately granted this status in post-communist Poland.

Opponents of recognising Silesian as a regional language include various leading politicians from both the current and former governing parties. The "Council of the Polish Language" has also spoken out against such recognition. The desire to have Silesian recognised as a regional language is not uncontroversial among Silesian intellectuals either, but both Silesian and non-Silesian intellectuals, including many Polonists, support the initiative.

The term "Silesian" refers to the modern variant of what was long disrespectfully labelled "Water Polish". The Slavicist Reinhold Olesch (one of the leading German Slavicists of his time with Silesian roots), who died in 1990, already explained that it is a Slavic variety (in Upper Silesia) in its basic structures, which, however, shows an enormous influence of German, especially in its lexis. This is the result of an intensive and extensive bilingualism which, despite the Upper Silesian region having belonged to German-speaking states for much longer, became established particularly as a result of industrialisation. A Germanisation policy that began with Bismarck's Kulturkampf played a major role. However, the strong influence of German had already prompted Gottfried Christoph Adelung to make disrespectful and stigmatising statements about Silesian well before the peak of borrowing from German. Negative statements about the "mixed idiom" can be found in both German and Polish publications, although Silesian was certainly no more influenced by German than English was by Romansh or Romanian by Slavic. This historical politicisation, if not explicitly, then latently still plays a role today that should not be underestimated.

In the historical constellation, German was the "high language" or the standard "umbrella language" from the mid-18th century until the end of the First and Second World Wars, while the Silesian dialects were the so-called "low variety" in sociolinguistics, i.e. a substandard. In linguistics, we speak of diglossia in the sense of socially asymmetrical bilingualism. This became particularly pronounced in society as a whole from the second half of the 19th century onwards. Historically, Silesian is undoubtedly part of a dialect continuum together with Polish dialects such as Greater Polish and Lesser Polish. However, as it developed over centuries outside the Polish state, it was also structurally quite distant from the modern Polish standard language until the end of the First / Second World War, but also from the surrounding dialects - not least due to German influences. To some extent, it has presumably moved closer to Polish again since the Second World War. This will be analysed in this vocabulary project.

As is usual in such constellations, Silesian has not yet been able to develop a uniform usage standard (usus), let alone produce an explicit standard codified by normative dictionaries and grammars. For parts of the Polish-Silesian elite, standard Polish, which even outside Silesia was only established among a small part of the Polish population until the beginning of the 20th century, was the relevant written language, which at that time was regarded in Silesia as an expression of Silesian patriotism. While Kashubian patriots attempted to emancipate Kashubian as a written language as early as the 19th century, a similar approach to Silesian can only be observed in the recent past. On the other hand, however, there can be no doubt that a number of so-called urban koines have developed in Silesian (in complete contrast to Kashubian), as Silesian moved into the cities as a result of strong rural-urban migration due to industrialisation (urbanisation). Work is currently underway to codify Silesian on the basis of the koineised variants. It is even more controversial. At least a partial codification would be necessary if Silesian (and not just Silesian) is to be taught in order to contribute to stabilisation and revitalisation. In this context, the question naturally arises as to whether and to what extent Germanisms should be taken into account in such a codification.

Publications on the project "German-Polish general language lexical parallelisms"