Abstract
Looks at the complex political and linguistic landscape in which the Act on the Polish Language was drafted and legislated. It also attempts to place it in the very particular historical context of partitions and foreign occupation that made Polish a forbidden language “whose protection became a sacred patriotic duty for several generations of Poles.” This protectionist attitude is reexamined in the context of European Union integration and the political and social challenges faced by Poland today. The controversy surrounding the Act is also discussed. The chapter also clarifies certain terms central to the book’s subject matter, such as standard language, national language and official language (Relevant Concepts section).
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The distinguished American sociolinguist Einar Haugen (1906–1994) lists Polish as one of the twelve languages in Europe which, as he puts it, “fell heir to Latin and Greek ” (the other in this list of Haugen’s Ausbau -languages are the major languages of Western Europe and Russian and Czech ) (Haugen 1966: 7).
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Stroińska, M., Andrews, E. (2018). The Polish Language Act: Legislating a Complicated Linguistic-Political Landscape. In: Andrews, E. (eds) Language Planning in the Post-Communist Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70926-0_10
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