Awakening the Language and Speakers’ Community of Wymysiöeryś

Abstract

The town of Wilamowice (southern Poland) is the unique home to the community of speakers of Wymysiöeryś. The language enclave originates from Colonial Middle High German and -according to diachronic dialectological analyses -is made up of a subexclave of the so-called Bielitz-Bialaer Sprachinsel. As a result of social and political cataclysms brought by the Second World War and the following ban on and gap in its intergenerational transmission, it faced an inescapable language death. That doom, however, has been restrained by the activities of dedicated native speakers, with Tymoteusz Król (born in 1993) functioning as an eco-and sociolinguistic relay between the generation of last speakers passing away and, unexpectedly, a growing group of potential new speakers. The microlanguage, now spoken as native by fewer than 20 Wilamowiceans, and still without any official recognition at the administrative level, is experiencing an astonishing, but well-prepared and local culture-based revitalisation course. This article discusses the recent achievements and prospective challenges of the revival processes for Wymysiöeryś -from an internal (including T. Król as the youngest native speaker and intra-community researcher) and external yet engaged (J. Olko and T. Wicherkiewicz as participating academics) perspectives, including the recent results of activities undertaken within an integral revitalisation programme based on the successful collaboration of the community, two major universities in Poland, as well as the local school and municipal authorities. The programme covers all three levels of language planning: corpus, status and acquisition. Efficiently combining grassroots and top-down approaches, the collaborating actors also ground language revitalisation in the social, cultural and economical benefits of preserving and extending the local cultural heritage and linguistic landscape.-Mȧnter, do dy wymysiöejer ryd zo weter zȧjn derhałda? -Dos ej ȧnikjer büw, wo kon wymysiöeryś ȧn ȧ łjyt kyndyn

Untitled

“…Teaching Wymysorys continues on a private basis, though there have been intermittent instances of the language being taught as an extracurricular activity in the local elementary school, even at University of Warsaw, and active communities of practice (Wenger 1999) have developed around a local cultural heritage association, theatre group, and folk ensemble. Detailed overviews of the progression of language revitalization in Wilamowice can be found in and Wicherkiewicz, Król & Olko (2017).…”

The Relationship Between Literature and Language Revitalization : “RewiTEATRalizacja”in Wilamowice

“…Teaching Wymysorys continues on a private basis, though there have been intermittent instances of the language being taught as an extracurricular activity in the local elementary school, even at University of Warsaw, and active communities of practice (Wenger 1999) have developed around a local cultural heritage association, theatre group, and folk ensemble. Detailed overviews of the progression of language revitalization in Wilamowice can be found in and Wicherkiewicz, Król & Olko (2017).…”

Mikroliteratura mikrojęzyka mikrospołeczności. Wilamowice, Fliöra-Fliöra i ich literatura

“…Obecnie są czynione starania o oficjalne uznanie zagrożonego (Nijakowski 2014;zob. Kancelaria Sejmu 2016, 2017 języka wilamowskiego za język regionalny w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej.…”