Poland may soon become a multilingual country, as last week the Sejm (Polish parliament) approved a bill that will officially recognise Silesian as a regional language, The Mayor EU reports.
The law still has to be approved by the Senate, and if that becomes a fact, Poland will officially have one official state language and two regional languages.
In last year’s Polish census, some 460,000 people said they were native speakers of the Silesian language and spoke it every day. This has prompted the new government to take steps to recognise in some form this minority living in the Upper Silesia region in the south of the country.
Once officially recognised, the Silesian language will be taught in schools and used in local administration in municipalities where at least 20% of the population declared in the last census that they speak the language.
Poland already has another official regional language, Kashubian. It is a small minority language spoken by about 87,000 people on the Baltic coast near Gdansk. It has had this status since 2005.
However, the situation with Silesian has proved more complex and controversial, as many linguists consider it a dialect of Polish rather than a separate language. Silesian has been heavily influenced by German lexicography, even though its grammatical structure is similar to Polish.
Using some theories of linguists as an argument, conservative and far-right political parties in the Sejm voted against a bill to give Silesian an official status.
However, literature in Silesian has been published since the beginning of the 21st century, and TV and radio channels now use the language in their programmes. Also, in Upper Silesia, many road and information signs are already written in Silesian.
