Is Silesian A Language Or A Dialect?
A Summary of Poland's Latest Political Talking Point
Greetings! Or as the Poles say: Witam! (And if Silesian is indeed a language, then a hearty, Korfantyesque witej is in order)
We here at Černobog's Shadow are delighted to introduce a new section: Insider Gorodki. This will be our geopolitical segment. And if it looks like a Slavicization of the English idiom “insider baseball”…… well, it is. Learn more about Gorodki here - a great game to play in deep, dark forests where partisans once hid and sang deep, melancholic songs among long-forgotten sacred groves to Radegast and other dark gods.
Enjoy! I look forward to providing all of you with an in-depth view of issues in this region that is either 1) neutral, or 2) what the mainstream doesn’t want to tell you. While we love and celebrate Greater Slavia’s glorious contrarianism, our goals are simple: are current events in the best interests of Slavic countries and the region? Occasionally the mainstream is right, but sadly that is not as common as we’d like. (Even books on Slavs have their problematic points) And this is a big reason we exist.
Almost all European countries are regional: this is true even of small countries like Slovakia, Slovenia and Lithuania. But Europe’s political entities are generally not that comfortable with regional diversity beyond, say, topography and folklore. This despite the lofty claims of the average multiculturalist that they love “diversity.” (The scummiest word in the English language today) Check their track record on European regional diversity and you’ll see how intellectually and morally bankrupt these people really are.
The exception is Spain, whose regionalism was a logical post-Franco development. (And, to a smaller extent, a post-ETA one where the Basques are concerned) Even so, Spain’s political establishment is not fully comfortable with the country’s current codified regionalism, as the world bore witness to some time ago when the Catalonians had a most eventful independence referendum. If things are calm now, it’s mostly because of the current left-wing government in Spain which neither rocks the boat nor seeks to be behaviorally pro-Castilian. Even so, there is more to celebrate about Spain’s unique regionalism than condemn in our view.
Another exception is Italy, though not by choice. Italy’s regionalism persists despite efforts to unify behind a single Italian national identity, not because of any effort to preserve regional identity. (Google Translate, who we’ll get into in a moment, recently “acknowledge” this by adding a few Italian regional languages like Lombard, Sicilian and Venetian)
Then there is the United Kingdom. But its separation between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is more of a hollow political shell than anything. Apart from the Welsh who, adamantly (and admirably), continue to preserve their indigenous language, there is precious little support from the State for cultivating the cultural strengths of these regions. In fact, much more money goes toward educating children in faraway languages like Urdu than endangered languages indigenous to the British Isles. Celebrating “diversity” indeed!
If we are able to lay out a spectrum of regional tolerance, the two ends and center points would be as such:
Spain - codified regional autonomy that includes regional languages like Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages alongside Castilian Spanish. (Though less well-known than the above, Asturian and Aragonese also share that status) Spain represents the extreme that is the strongest regional autonomy in a political system.
Germany - the middle point of the spectrum. Germany is a federal republic that has decentralized a lot of power to its Germanic regions like Saxony, Bavaria, Thuringia, etc. All of which, no matter how different, are (or were) Germanic and/or German speaking. However, Germany’s indigenous Slavic minority - the Sorbs of Lusatia - have no political representation or even a federal region of their own in which to preserve their language, even though “carving” Lusatia out of Brandenburg and Saxony would not be the most difficult of tasks. There is little to no incentive from the German government to preserve Sorbian, and it is all the same to the Germans if the Sorbian language and culture dies out.
France - a country known for its extreme anti-regionalism. In the French constitution, all regional languages in France are dialects of standard French. This is a codified fib: the Breton language of Brittany is a Celtic language, not a Romance language; while the dialects of Alsace are Germanic. And yet this denial of reality has become the reality, Inception-style, of French politics.
This is where we come to Poland, which is unambiguously in the same category as France. (Though not as hardcore)
Once upon a time, Poland (with Lithuania) was a giant, multiethnic country with numerous different ethnic groups. Because of today’s fetish around the word “diversity,” some have looked back to that period of time and admired it for no other reason than the lack of homogeneity. Today, homogeneity is seen as some kind of handicap, or even something akin to a mental disability.1 (Even though it’s not)
(At the time of my last revision of this article, more revelations surrounding the Islamic grooming gangs in Britain - the greatest symbol of multicultural failure - have come out that are absolutely nightmarish. Never, at any point in history, have we been more glad that the Slavic cultures are not contemporary-style “multicultural” nations than today. More on that in a future post. But agree or disagree, because of this I must stress that I am talking about an older, very different idea unrelated to what’s happening today.)
While the multicultural variant of this idea feels new, in Poland it is not. It was an important part of the stance between Poland’s influential early 20th century political dualism: Józef Piłsudski vs. Roman Dmowski. While Piłsudski, for decades, was considered a “proto-fascist” or something along those lines by Anglo scholars who sought to forgive and/or glorify the German ubermensch at the expense of the Polish untermensch (the “Poles deserved their loss” argument, expressed most recently by Evan McGilvray), his legacy is being reconsidered today for reasons elaborated upon below.
Rehashing the nuances of these stances would require an entire book. But the two stances are important to keep in mind:
Piłsudski wanted to resurrect the old Respublika, or Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in a modern form. Including its multiethnic character. This meant that his vision saw a place for the Jews, the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Lithuanians and other groups that were more demographically represented in Poland in 1918. (Piłsudski was generally well-liked among Polish Jews, an historical fact that has only been recently “rediscovered” and hastily rescued from the old, anti-Piłsudski narratives) Theoretically, such a formula can include ethnic groups without strong historical connections to the Old Respublika: but such an “experiment” has never been tried. (Not in Poland, anyway)
Dmowski, in contrast, advocated for a Roman Catholic ethno-state even if it meant a reduction in Poland’s borders and the forgoing of the borderlands, territory with important Polish heritage but demographically mostly Ukrainian or Belarusian.
The unintended winner of this debate (though through the ironic and unintended actions of Joseph Stalin) was Dmowski: since 1945, Poland has been a demographic ethno-state, albeit a smaller state than Dmowski envisioned. As Dmowski wished (as did Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s wartime leader and a widely respected military thinker back then), the Western border is at the Oder-Neisse Line with rivers to bolster Poland’s otherwise lacking defense possibilities. And since 1989 has been an ethno-state behaviorally, though not to the same degree as, say, Ireland, Europe’s archetypal ethno-state.(Again, until recently)
The Polish left, the distant (though ideologically polluted) successors of Piłsudski - who, though a patriot and a hero, was also a socialist - is in a conundrum: recreating the Respublika in some form would make Poland “multicultural” and give them all the international validation they pathetically desire from weak Western European countries. But the Polish left cannot realize Piłsudski’s vision without different ethnic groups to successfully imitate the Respublika’s previous heterogeneity. Problem (for them) is: Poland, on the whole, is comfortable with being an ethno-state with limited amounts of foreign presence that ideally isn’t from Islamic countries. (Basically, the common sense approach toward immigration) Dmowski certainly didn’t have the only solution for Poland’s future: but his solution does suit Polish people whether his detractors like it or not. And if something isn’t broken, why fix it?
While the Polish multiculturalists have had some success demonizing Dmowski since he wasn’t all that fond of the Jews, they have had a harder time breaking Poland’s comfortable homogeneity. For one, history is a popular Polish pastime: it’s much harder to lie about history in Poland than in countries further West. Meanwhile, mass immigration a la Germany and France is very unpopular in Poland, enough to where any pro-EU or leftist government in power (like the current government) couldn’t commit to such a policy unless 1) it wanted to commit political suicide, or 2) it did so in a deceptive manner, like Joe Biden flying over 300,000 illegal immigrants around the country via small airports in the middle of the night. The current PM, Donald Tusk - a classic powermonger with no other merits apart from friends in Brussels who can tell the media he “saved democracy” - is not risking any such “sneak attack” this close to the upcoming presidential election.
This is where we come to Silesia. (And, to a lesser extent, Kashubia)
To begin with: if we put aside small remnants of Lithuanians and Belarusians in Podlaskie, remnants of the Lemkos of Podkarpackie and small remnants of Germans in Opole, Poland does have one clearcut indigenous minority not found elsewhere: the Kashubians.
Much as the Sorbs of Lusatia are the last remnant of the numerous West Slavic tribes who lived in what is today Germany, the Kashubians are the last descendants of the Pomeranian Slavs who were, gradually, replaced and/or assimilated by the Germans. (Whom we might, in Scottish fashion, call “The Hammer of the Slavs”) While their close regional proximity to Gdańsk (once the German city of Danzig) has something to do with the pro-German association (and some have told me Kashubian vocabulary has a lot of German words, though data I found elsewhere claims it’s as small as 5%; it might depend on the dialect) this is also a recent political trend since Tusk, widely disliked by conservative Poland and whose political rule is often Germanphilic, has both Kashubian and German ancestry. Leading to a natural, if unnecessary, conflation of Kashubianness with pro-German sentiment.
The truth is that whenever the Kashubs - Slavs, and therefore untermenschen - have been under German control, it has - surprise! - not been to their advantage any more than it was for other Poles. As mostly Roman Catholics, the Kashubs underwent a lot of hardship in the Protestant Prussian state in the 19th century. Their struggle is, essentially, the same as the Polish struggle in this respect. (At least with those who were under German/Prussian occupation)
I will write more about the Kashubians in future posts. But the truth is somewhere in the middle. On one hand, most Kashubians live lives almost completely synonymous with everyone else in Poland. There are about 233,000 Kashubians in Poland; of that number, only 16,000 declared themselves exclusively Kashubian. (Less than 10%) While around 87,000 of that number (40%?) speak the Kashubian language at home.
On the other hand, discussion about the status of the Kashubian language appears to have reached the verdict that it is, indeed, a language. Not knowing Kashubian I can’t add much more, except that visibly the Kashubian language has a lot of special letters and is very easy to tell apart from Polish in written form, more than Czech and Slovak. (And is equally difficult for other Poles to read) To this day, Kashubian is the only language in Poland that has special legal protection.
To my knowledge, I am also not aware of any Kashubian secessionist movements. If they exist they must be as insignificant as they are small. There was a Young Kashubian cultural movement in the early 20th century. But it was not, to my knowledge, anti-Polish. (Especially as the region was under Prussian control at that time) For all intents and purposes it is not contradictory to be both consciously Polish and consciously Kashubian.
This is where we come to Silesian.
While the Kashubian roots of Donald Tusk gave the topic a political taint for some, the status of the Kashubians was never really a serious issue. Not everyone agreed about giving the Kashubs a separate status. But as mentioned, the Kashubs don’t appear to have any desire of forming an independent Kashub state. Therefore, any argument that the Kashubs want to subvert Polish identity is a difficult one to back.
The Silesians are a different story.
The historical region of Silesia is large, and not exclusively Polish. It also has a mixed history that makes Polish-Kashubian history simple in comparison.
In Poland, Silesia is comprised of the three voivodeships of Lower Silesia (with Wroclaw as its capital), Opole (named after its capital) and Upper Silesia, which is officially called just Silesia. (With Katowice as its capital) A part of the Silesian region is also in the Czech Republic - its biggest city is Ostrava - while a sliver of the historical region remains in Germany as part of the Saxony region. (The city of Görlitz and its surroundings)
While its oldest cities (like Wrocław) and landmarks (like Książ Castle) were founded by the Poles or other Slavic tribes (though I noticed some pro-German revisionists have been at work on Wikipedia), most of Silesia became German starting around seven hundred years ago. An awkward Roman Catholic hangover from that time is the patron saint of the region, St. Hedwig (Jadwiga) of Silesia, a German nun who, while no doubt living an admirably pious life, also facilitated increased German settlement in the region. (This, of course, before Martin Luther) Though the Austrians were in charge for a time, the German-speaking nature of most Silesia remained the status quo until the Red Army expelled them from what is now Lower Silesia, Opole and parts of Silesia proper in 1945. (Remnants of the historic German population live in villages throughout the Opole voivodeship that also, like the Kashubs, have bilingual town signs)
These parts of Silesia have a kind of schizophrenic mixed heritage as a result, compounded by whatever was brought to this region by the Eastern Polish ancestors of the region’s current inhabitants. (The inhabitants of Polish Lwów (L’viv), for instance, were moved to Wrocław) Most of these Poles no longer have a specific dialect since being uprooted from their previous region and mixing them around in the Reclaimed Lands also uprooted them from their dialect. (For this reason, Poland is generally more homogenous with language than other European countries)
I mention this because it is not these parts of Silesia that ostensibly speak a separate language. After all, they were not originally Silesians. It is in Silesia proper (where the Poles of that region are regionally indigenous) that the issue emerges; the eastern end of the historical region that, unlike the rest, successfully resisted Germanization. (Czech Silesia also did, but since the end of the war most Poles in that region have either become Czechified or moved to Poland proper)
As most Poles know, the Silesians are very self-conscious (and proud) of their regional history. They have a few heroes of their own (like Wojciech Korfanty, leader of the Silesian Uprising, after whom the town of Korfantów in Opole voivodeship is named) and the region generally feels separate from other parts of Poland. In many respects it shares the same level of regional idiosyncrasies as regions in European countries with stronger regional distinction, high by Polish standards.
The southern part of the region also has a distinct history related to its administration by Austria-Hungary: centered around the border town of Cieszyn and the Habsburgian (by Polish standards) city of Bielsko-Biała, southern Silesia is, historically, Poland’s traditional Protestant heartland. (Though today the majority are Roman Catholic)
But until only a very short time ago, there was no widespread discussion - let alone awareness - of the existence of an actual Silesian language outside the voivodeship. That also goes for yours truly. (Though I had read about a few old Germanic dialects still spoken by a few in certain Silesian towns, like the Wymysorys dialect)
Wikipedia paints a different story, suggesting the debate actually goes back hundreds of years. Maybe. But I am not in a position to trust it for one simple reason:
Silicon Valley has decided to get involved in Polish politics.
Some discussion around protecting Silesian as a language emerged when Tusk regained power. But the discussion was amplified considerably when Google Translate included it among its new languages back in 2024. Google cited the number of speakers as the real reason, when many protested that Kashubian - whose status, as explained, is clear-cut - should have been added. (the recent census listed 457,900 speakers of Silesian) But when the other languages added are considered - especially Crimean Tatar in both Latin and Cyrillic form, which only has around 60,000 speakers and who, being from Crimea, are tied up with the Russo-Ukrainian War - it became clear that Google preferred to use Google Translate to make a series of political statements rather than actually consider what was best for the cultivation of linguistic diversity in the world.
As well as rejecting Kashubian Google didn’t add any of the dialects of Sorbian, a language with close to the same amount of speakers as Crimean Tatar. Not to mention Carpathian languages like Lemko and Rusyn that are closely related to Ukrainian and that would, just as easily, represent acts of pro-Ukrainian solidarity. (The problem for the multiculturalists is that Lemko and Rusyn aren’t Muslim enough)
It’s also worth noting that some of the African languages Google added are clearcut dialects, not fully-separate languages. So at the end of the day, they have the means to defend adding a dialect if things boil down to a debate. But that is a case for African advocates on Substack to unpack.
So who is right?
The Upper Silesians are, undeniably, a regionally conscious people by Polish standards. And their regional character does add flavor to the national character of the country, though (apologies, Silesians) not much; not compared to the Kashubs or the Gorals (highlanders) in the mountains, who are the ultimate Polish metric for this kind of thing. (Even the Nazis utilized this cultural metric, though in a pseudo-scientific manner)
But from my observation, Silesian doesn’t appear sufficiently different from Polish to be considered a separate language. Even Wikipedia, which can’t just call Silesian a language like a good mainstream political actor without context, uses the term “ethnolect.” (A very revealing term) I disagree, since the Silesians are generally not regarded as a separate ethnic group from the Poles.
We can also look to the Czechs, who had a similar conversation when the Lachian poet, Óndra Łysohorsky, briefly became prominent in an earlier time for poetry written in his dialect. (And translated into English by Ewald Osers) While Lachian - described as the “halfway dialect” between Czech and Polish - has its distinctions and Łysohorsky was a fine poet, the debate appears to have ultimately ruled in favor of regarding Lachian as a dialect. And this in the country that was willing to accept that their ex-countrymen, the Slovaks, were different enough to require their own state.
As Łysohorsky was a native of Czech Silesia and so is the Lachian dialect, this naturally affects the way in which we judge Silesia’s current quest for language status. While a dialect of Czech is naturally going to find itself on a very different place in the family tree than a dialect of Polish (Polish being Lechitic, Czech being Czech/Slovak) it is, geographically, a Slavic Silesian dialect. Incidentally, a big international fuss was never made about the now-forgotten discussion around Lachian.
Personally, I would need more evidence to determine whether it’s a dialect. One man’s dialect is another man’s language. For the moment, I cannot say. But if the jury is still out when it comes to languages vs. “lects” as the discussion seems to be right now, it seems the popular verdict around Silesian (outside Silesia, anyway) is premature and politically driven irrespective of our view.
Far from reminding me of Kashubian or Sorbian, the “Silesian question” reminds me of the ex-Yugoslav states where, since its breakup, what was once called Serbo-Croatian has also broken up into Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. While there are actual differences - the most noteworthy being that Croatian uses the Latin alphabet while the Serbs use Cyrillic2 - to most outsiders they look like ethnic window dressing rather than anything substantially different in a linguistic sense. Though those people tend to be condescending snobs, they are both right and wrong. To find out how they’re wrong, the anti-Slavic snobs are welcome to go speak Croatian in Belgrade or Serbian in Zagreb. See how things work out.
Of course, we here at Černobog's Shadow understand what went down in the 90s. But throughout Greater Slavia, it is not anomalous to find people who view the disintegration of Yugoslavia (and Serbo-Croatian by default) as a Western scheme to weaken the region through balkanization, rather than the conventional explanation of a disintegrating national explosion that unleashed long bottled up ethnic hatreds in a region that “has always just been violent.” Of course, two things can be true at the same time.
There is some truth to this analysis: though a debtor state that only Tito could hold together, Yugoslavia was not a small, pushover state. If it was, Tito would not have gotten away with being the only one to give Joseph Stalin the middle finger and live to tell the tale. Analyzing Yugoslavia always has its challenges, and what it would be today we can only speculate. But if Yugoslavia hadn’t fallen apart, it’s not difficult to imagine it today as a country like Poland regarded by many as a minor power. This is something every Yugo-nostalgist understands.
If most Poles think of Silesian as a dialect, so be it. If Silesians think of their ethnolect as a separate language, all the more power to them. We here at Černobog's Shadow are happy to entertain either possibility.
But there are political ramifications for the atomization of Silesian from the Polish language that cannot be ignored. Namely, the unending assault upon the stability of Poland’s national identity. (And, indeed, that of all countries where national identity formed in organic circumstances)
As far as regional autonomy is concerned and in practice, the effect would likely be no more challenging to “national security” as the recognition of Kashubian. Tusk’s party, I suspect, thinks recognizing Silesian would have a knock-on effect in other parts of the historic Silesian region that boost its separateness from Poland, whose cultural consciousness Tusk once called “an abomination;” I find that outcome to be highly unlikely. At the least, it will be an easy accomplishment for a government that has failed to apply even its own program due to it functioning not as a unified government, but as yet another “anti-right” cordon sanitaire that poses as saviors of democracy. At most, towns will have bilingual signs and if Silesian is really just a dialect (for instance, Katowice and Katowicy) the joke will be on them and Tusk’s party and no one else.
But as Silesian is currently considered one of the four main dialects of Polish3 - the other three being Greater Polish, Lesser Polish and Mazovian - “subtracting” it would pave the way for the balkanization of the other three dialects. It would be the end of a united Polish consciousness and a dream come true for the Germans and the Russians.
As language is a preserve of culture, this would mean the slow but steady splintering apart of Poland’s national identity. This would pave the way for Western (and possibly Russian) as well as corporate exploitation of the country in ways that would make the exploitation of the 90s (and some of the current stuff) seem like child’s play. It doesn’t matter if one thinks Tusk or Kaczynski’s PiS Party is a better alternative, more “democratic” or whatever stupid talking point is cherished. Such a fate is unquestionably and objectively not in Poland’s (or Greater Slavia’s) best interests. Period. End of story.
The Slavs have been splintered enough since the collapse of Communism. At some point there has to be a point where we say “stop;” and with respect to the Kosovars, I think Kosovo is a good place to erect that stop sign. Especially given that these “shenanigans” aren’t the norm in other parts of the world. (Apart from, uncoincidentally, the Middle East where an Arabistan in the Levant has been denied to them for over a hundred years) For some reason, it is countries in this region that must balkanize themselves while the rest of the world maintains its unity. Why?
Addressing the Ukraine War would need its own post; and we’ll probably have to do that at some point. (Though for now, I’d rather not scare off any possible guest post or interview possibilities) But part of the reason we started Černobog's Shadow is due to a very real shadow that hangs over this region: the possibility that it might become the next Middle East. (Where Western military involvement is more disagreeable to the public than ever before, to the degree that America’s ally, Israel, is given the “from the river to the sea” prescription by increasing numbers of Americans) The real target in that sense would be countries with oil, like Russia and Ukraine. Ordinary Americans won’t cry if “White people” are exploited; on the contrary, Slavs have stupid-sounding accents and (wink wink) they’ll deserve it. But weaken a small Slavic nation without oil sufficiently - like Poland - and there would be no end to the amount of corporate exploitation the powers that be could wreak upon the region.
The only thing standing in its way is national dignity. Embodied (depending on the country) by religiosity and/or national identity. There’s a reason why countries further West, while posing as allies, are doing everything they can to weaken the cultural defense mechanisms in the region. They do it under the supposed banner of “democracy” so that Americans and (increasingly) Western Europeans ignorant of the region fall into lock step and support what is basically a Neo-Colonialist project. Even though there was nothing whatsoever undemocratic about the elections that brought the PiS Party into power previously. Only corporatists, globalists, ignorant people and those who think Richard Wurmbrand’s torture was a good thing actually believe the current government is “saving democracy.”
In general, we here at Černobog's Shadow wish the Silesians the best in finding a satisfactory political solution for their need to express their autonomy. But we strongly encourage them not to spill anything and look to the Kashubs as good role models in this respect. The vultures are watching, ready to circle at a moment’s notice. And no matter what they say, this we can assure you: the politicians who champion this cause have nothing whatsoever to do with “democracy.”
One of the most seriously anti-Polish “approaches” to Polish culture in both academia and the commons is the “Polishness is a mental disease” perspective, amplified by Tusk’s “abomination” comments. To call it problematic is to put it very, very lightly.
Many Serbs also write in the Latin script. But interestingly, unlike the Tatars, there is no separate Cyrillic and Latin option even though Serbian is the official language of a nation of millions. I wonder why that is. Nothing at all to do with politics, right?
There used to be six dialects: the four mentioned plus the Northern and Southern Borderlands dialects spoken by Poles in what is now Belarus and Ukraine. The Soviet Union’s population transfers have more or less put an end to them.