The Polish language originated as the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility; this process differs from the standardization of French and German, which grew out of the regiolects of Paris and Saxony (where Martin Luther had made his German translation of the Bible). In the pre-written period of the Polish language (prior to the 16th century), highly mobile nobles of various ethnic origins from all corners of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) contributed to this sociolect from various Slavic dialects, or else adopted this coalescing social koine. Polish continued as the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility well into the 19th century, after the late-18th-century erasure of Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe. In the early 16th century, Polish achieved the status of co-official language in the Commonwealth Kingdom of Poland, alongside Latin. At that time, Polish was modelled on Bohemian (Czech), both in terms of spelling and vocabulary; this was before the Hussite reforms in the Bohemian Lands. The Commonwealth’s political and economic power caused aspiring Orthodox boyars from Moldavia and Wallachia to adopt it as a language of wider communication. In 1697 the Cyrillic-based Ruthenian (Ruski, seen today as the source of Belarusian and Ukrainian) was banned in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was replaced with Polish, which thus became the polity’s main official language and consolidated the cultural Polonization of its nobility (who in the Grand Duchy nevertheless persisted in identifying themselves as “Lithuanians”). Specifically, the ban applied to the use of Cyrillic letters, which were ideologically associated with Orthodox Christianity; by the same token, in Muscovy – as Russia was known prior to 1721 – the Latin alphabet and language were disparaged as “Catholic”. Hence, Ruthenian written in “Catholic”, Latin letters, with the addition of numerous Latin phrases, was perceived as Polish in Poland-Lithuania. As a result, the Polish language at that time straddled what since the early 19th century came to be seen as a fundamental taxonomic divide: that between the “West Slavic” and “East Slavic” languages. (In observed sociolinguistic reality on the ground, both groups of languages actually belong to a North Slavic dialect continuum.)
Between 1772 and 1795, Prussian, Russian and Habsburg encroachments erased Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe in three successive partitions (1772, 1793 and 1795). In all the three resultant partition zones, the Polish-Lithuanian nobility retained their property and privileges, and remained the ruling elite. In the Prussian zone a Polish-German bilingualism emerged in education and local administration, while in Habsburg-ruled Galicia Latin was reinstated as the main medium of education and administration (prior to its replacement with German in 1784). Galicia’s official Latin-German bilingualism gave way to a wholly German-language administration in the late 1810s, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1807-09, Napoleon briefly constructed a rump Polish-Lithuanian polity, the Duchy of Warsaw, ruled by a Napoleonic client-monarch and with Polish for its official language; the establishment of this Duchy (at the expense of some Polish-Lithuanian territories seized from Prussia and the Austrian Empire) strengthened the predominance of German in the Prussian territories and the minorization of Slavic-speakers there.
The replacement of Latin with Polish as the main medium of education for Poland-Lithuania’s nobility had begun in 1773 with the Europe-wide dissolution of the Jesuit Order and the secularization of its teaching institutions. Polish became a language of instruction in elementary and secondary schools and in the universities of Cracow and Wilno (Vilnius), the erstwhile capitals of the Polish Kingdom and Lithuanian Grand Duchy. However, when in 1784 the Habsburgs founded the University of Lemberg (L’viv) in the Galician capital, its language of instruction was Latin.
Although the Polish-Lithuanian nobility were highly literate in Polish, since the turn of the 18th century the language of its cultural and social achievements had been French (which had superseded Latin). Until the 1860s nobles would continue to prefer reading books in French, which thwarted the development of the fledgling Polish-language publishing industry. During the first third of the 19th century, Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony, alongside Breslau (Wrocław), Danzig (Gdańsk) and Königsberg (Kaliningrad) in Prussia, had remained the main centres of Polish-language publishing, traditionally catering to Saxony’s and Prussia’s Germans, who needed to master Polish for trade or for political and social relations with Poland-Lithuania and its nobility. Polish was used by the nobility mostly for writing letters, diaries and popular miscellanies (silvae). There was, however, a demand for Polish-language school textbooks, especially in the Russian-governed Wilno School District (1803-33) with the University of Wilno at its administrative centre. At that time, with 1200 students per year (three times more than at Oxford University during the same period), it was Russia’s largest university.
Polish remained the language of administration in Russia’s partition zone, and even spread to the neighbouring Russian territories seized from Poland-Lithuania in the 17th century; this process was cut short by the imposition of Russian in the aftermath of the disastrous anti-Russian uprising of 1830-31. But the heritage of the Polonization of the 1773-1832 period proved tenacious, and in the 1860s came to be experienced in national terms. Until the revolution of 1917, Polish remained the main language of social advancement for Slavic-, Lithuanian- and some Latvian-speakers (especially in Latgale, or Polish Livonia), irrespective of religion, from Dinaburg (Daugavpils) and Vil’na (Vilnius) in the north to Kiev (Kyiv) and Odessa (Odesa) in the south. Until 1905 the Russian administration considered “White Russian” (Belarusian) and “Little-Russian” (Ukrainian) Polish dialects, and discouraged or forbade publications in these “patois” (narechia) between 1863 and 1905. The ban was also partially extended to Lithuanian, which could only be printed in Cyrillic script. The use of this “Orthodox” alphabet was rejected by Catholic Lithuanians, who defied the ban by smuggling in great quantities of Latin-letter Lithuanian books from East Prussia. Russian attempts at imposing Cyrillic on Polish-language publications in 1852 and 1865 were even less successful and soon abandoned.
Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), the Duchy of Warsaw (shorn of its second-partition territories) was transformed into a Kingdom of Poland (Tsarstvo Pol’skoe, commonly known as “Congress Poland”) in personal union with Russia. The Kingdom’s French-language constitution given by the tsar was the first-ever document overtly making Polish the official language in any polity. In this way, Russia found itself in possession of over 80 per cent of the former Polish-Lithuanian lands, while the Polish-Lithuanian nobles living in the enlarged Russian partition zone accounted for over two-thirds of the Russian Empire’s nobility. This strongly bolstered the status of Polish in these areas, even though Russian officially replaced it in the Congress Kingdom after the disastrous anti-Russian uprising of 1863-64. In its aftermath, the Kingdom was directly incorporated into Russia, its name informally changed to the Vistula Land (Privislinsky krai). Russia’s gradual annexations of Polish-Lithuanian lands since the mid-17th century, together with its uninterrupted possession of most of the former Commonwealth’s territory between 1795 and 1917, infused the Russian language with numerous linguistic loans from Polish. Initially, such loans were transferred through the intervening medium of Ruthenian.
The deliberate standardization of Polish commenced with the first-ever dictionary of the language, the multi-volume, authoritative Słownika języka Polskiego (“Dictionary of the Polish Language”, 1807-15) published in the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw. It was authored by a Lutheran Polish-Lithuanian nobleman of Swedish origin, Samuel Linde (1771–1841), and modelled on Johann Christoph Adelung’s benchmark Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (1774-86). Linde had met Adelung while studying at Leipzig University. The success of Linde’s dictionary was such that it inspired Josef Jungmann’s (1773–1847) Czech Slownjk česko-německý (1835-39), which marked the beginning of the standardization of that language while infusing formal Czech (spisovná čeština) with numerous Polonisms, thus making it intelligible to Polish-speakers; this partial mutual comprehensibility perpetuated earlier crossovers between the two languages. The second edition of Linde’s dictionary was published in Galicia in 1854-60, and spawned, in 1861, a two-volume Słownik języka polskiego in Vil’na for popular use across Russia’s western gubernias. The first half of the 19th century saw a limited purism directed at “macaronisms”, long Latin and French phrases and sentences which heretofore had typically interlaced Polish-language texts and speech. Following the Habsburg Ausgleich of 1867, German was replaced with Polish as Galicia’s official language in 1869, ending the brief hiatus after 1864 during which Polish had not been an official language in any polity or autonomous region.
The Russian government banned the official use of Polish in administration and education in the Congress Kingdom (1864); following the establishment of the German Empire, German was imposed in the Prussian partition zone in 1873. This left Habsburg Galicia as, de facto, an Ersatz Polish ethnolinguistic nation-state: the only territory to fit the ethnoterritorial equation between language and land. That territorialization of language, first propounded by Ernst Moritz Arndt, had become a widely accepted principle in cultural geography in the second half of the century, and language had been accepted as the “natural” basis for national projects across Central Europe. In 1861 the question about language as the measure of “demographic sizes” of (postulated) nations was included in the Prussian census; in 1872 the sixth international statistical congress (held at St Petersburg) adopted it as a norm for government administrations across Europe; in 1881 language featured in the Austro-Hungarian census, in 1897 in the Russian census. The subdivision of populations into ethnolinguistic groups was popularized on ethnographic maps, which were invoked as scientific proof for where a state for this or that postulated nation should be created.
In the wake of the two failed anti-Russian uprisings staged by Polish-Lithuanian nobles, aristocratic nationalism faded during the last third of the 19th century and was replaced by Polish ethnolinguistic nationalism. The process was dominated by the politician and ideologue Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), who equated the Polish nation with the Polish-Lithuanian nobility and Slavophone peasants (as long as they were Catholics) but strictly excluded Jews, even those living in the Congress Kingdom, who had mostly adopted Polish as their preferred language of wider communication. This definition meant relinquishing most of the Russian partition zone – much to the dislike of Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), who envisaged a federal, multi-ethnic Poland, territorially corresponding to all of the former Poland-Lithuania, albeit with the Poles as the dominant nation.
Galicia’s entire educational system had Polish as the medium of instruction (and universities in Lwów/L’viv and Cracow), including compulsory elementary schooling for all; full male suffrage was established in 1907 in the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These factors began to mould the crownland’s nobility and its Slavophone Catholic peasantry into a novel, ethnolinguistic entity: the Polish nation. In 1895 the first-ever peasant party of self-defined non-noble Poles (born to parents emancipated from serfdom in 1849) was founded in Galicia. At the same time, in Russia’s partition zone, many nobles (szlachta) – impoverished by the 1861 abolition of serfdom (1864 in the Congress Kingdom), by falling prices of agricultural products and by land confiscations after the uprisings – earned a living by teaching Polish. The poetry of the szlachta nobleman Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), which lastingly earned him the status of the Polish national poet, began to tempt nobles’ reading habits away from French. A similar reorientation was achieved in the case of Russian readers by Alexander Puškin (1799–1837), who until Mickiewicz’s departure from the country was his friend and compatriot. Mickiewicz’s death in Istanbul, where under Ottoman protection he sought to establish Polish and Jewish legions to fight against Russia for an independent “Poland” (i.e. Poland-Lithuania), mirrors the poetic career of Byron (1788–1824) and his death in Missolonghi while supporting the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule. The legacy of multicultural Poland-Lithuania is clearly seen in the posthumous reception of Mickiewicz’s poetry. His work was swiftly translated into Belarusian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and his oft-expressed fondness for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (echoed in the 20th century by Czesław Miłosz) was noted by Belarusian and Jewish readers, who appropriated him, as did the Poles, as their national poet; thus, a common, pre-national past can inform separate national presents.
Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–1887) singlehandedly created the Polish novel by authoring over 300 of them, whereas earlier poetry had been the dominant genre in Polish literature. In the process Kraszewski weaned Polish-Lithuanian nobles off French-language novels and made this genre popular among non-noble members of the then coalescing Polish-speaking intelligentsia. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s (1846–1916) historical novels about the past greatness of Poland-Lithuania became runaway bestsellers, immediately translated into many European languages, and earned the author a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. Władysław Reymont (1867–1925) replicated Sienkiewicz’s worldwide success with immensely popular novels about peasants, emancipated women and industrialists, though he had to wait for his own Nobel Prize until 1924. In observing the minutiae of peasant life Reymont emulated the rustic realism of the Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910; Nobel Prize, 1903).
Since the 1870s the Polish-language publishing industry, tolerated and active in all the three partition zones, expanded and boosted the emergence of an all-Polish sphere of cultural production and diffusion. In Galicia, the example of Polish-language cultural and administrative autonomy inspired an emerging Ruthenian (Ukrainian) national movement that rapidly built a full educational system and secured the use of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) in eastern Galicia’s local administration. Across the border, in Russia, the manumitted serf Taras Ševčenko (1814-61), writing in Little-Russian (Ukrainian), became the Ukrainians’ national poet. During the 1880s, Lithuanian and Belarusian national movements emerged, inspired by the model of Polish nationalism and cultural life, and provoked by the dual irritant of forced Russification and the Polish nationalists’ refusal to recognize their separate cultural identity. These movements gathered steam after the 1905 Revolution, which heralded the temporary liberalization of politics in the Russian Empire, and expressed themselves in a modern literary productivity. Žemaitė (1845–1921), born to a Polish-speaking Polish-Lithuanian noble family which kept aloof from the Lithuanian-speaking peasantry, nonetheless chose to write, in Lithuanian, on peasant topics, like Reymont or Bjørnson, and became a renowned short-story writer, at first published in Germany’s East Prussia, and after 1905 in Russia. Belarus’s national poet, Janka Kupala (1882–1942), from an impoverished Polish-Lithuanian noble family, began writing poetry in Polish but in 1905 switched to Belarusian. Yet another literary career path was chosen by Oscar Milosz (1877–1939) – a distant cousin of Czesław Miłosz – born to a Polish-Lithuanian noble father and a Jewish mother from Warsaw. He spoke Polish but wrote poetry exclusively in French, while identifying himself as a Lithuanian and representing that state in the League of Nations.
In order to highlight their non-Polishness, Lithuanians switched from Polish-style to Czech-style orthography for writing their language. Catholic Belarusians followed the same path of orthographic self-differentiation, although Orthodox Belarusians continued to write and publish in Cyrillic-based Belarusian. As a result, until the mid-20th century, Belarusian remained a bi-scriptural language (like Serbo-Croatian), with works printed in either, or sometimes even in both, Cyrillic or Latin letters. Ruthenian/Ukrainian, which until the 19th century had frequently used the Polish-style Latin alphabet, gradually gravitated towards an exclusive use of Cyrillic, especially after the failed 1859 imposition of the Czech-style Latin alphabet on Ruthenian in Galicia. Nonetheless, five centuries of Polish-Lithuanian involvement left Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian with a plethora of Polish linguistic loans. Numerous Ukrainian philologists, largely from Kiev (Kyiv) University (founded by the Russian authorities in 1834 as successor to the dissolved University of Vilnius) compiled a multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Little Russian (Ukrainian) language from the 1860s on; they circumvented the tsarist ban on publishing in that language by periodically moving their activities across the Austro-Hungarian border into Galicia. The dictionary was published in Kiev shortly after the 1905 suspension of the ban (Slovar’ ukrains’koi movy, 1907-09). The Polish lexicographic tradition also inspired the multivolume authoritative dictionary of Lithuanian (Lietuvių kalbos žodynas, 1924/41-2002): it was initiated by Kazimieras Būga (1879–1924), who did research at St Petersburg University under the supervision of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929; of Polish-Lithuanian szlachta extraction). A Belarusian ethnic and linguistic identity was articulated in the work of the philologist and ethnographer Jaŭhim Karski (1861–1931) from Grodno (Hrodna). Following his studies at Kiev University, he served as rector of the Russian-medium University of Warsaw. The crown of his scholarly career was the 7-volume work on the Belarusians’ language and customs (Belorussy, 1903-22) and ultimately inspiring the codification of that language in the second half of the 20th century (official dictionary: Tlumachalʹny sloŭnik belaruskaĭ movy, 1977-84).
Post-partition Polish absorbed numerous linguistic loans from Russian and German. German vocabulary in fields such as the civil service, technology, railways or science was adopted into Polish in Galicia; in the Russian partition zone, this vocabulary of modernity found a conduit both through Polish and Russian, and thence into Belarusian, Latvian and Yiddish. This process was intensified under the German occupation of Russia’s north-western gubernias during the Great War. Russian was banned, while education and administration was encouraged for the first time in history in Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Yiddish. To this end a seminal 7-language polyglot dictionary was published (Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch: Deutsch, Polnisch, Russisch, Weissruthenisch, Litauisch, Lettisch, Jiddisch, 1918) by the German military authorities.
Post-1918 independent Poland had Polish as its sole official and national language. Only then was compulsory elementary education in Polish for all introduced outside Galicia, but in reality the provision was not fully enforced until after 1945. Meanwhile, the imposition of Polish as the sole medium of instruction at universities and the rapid Polonization of education for minorities alienated interwar Poland’s five million Ukrainians, who lost the cultural and administrative autonomy that they had enjoyed before 1918 in eastern Galicia. There were two main standards of the Polish language, one developed in Galicia and the other in Warsaw in the Russian partition zone. In interwar Poland the latter (“Warsaw”) standard achieved dominance thanks to its metropolitan home base and its codification in the multivolume authoritative dictionary Słownik języka polskiego (1900-27, by Jan Karłowicz et al.). Both standards were finally united in 1936, though the actual implementation of this long-debated unification was not effected until during the Second World War, by the German and Soviet occupation authorities.
Meanwhile, the exclusion of Jews from the Polish nation pushed them toward Yiddish nationalism and Zionism (associated with the Hebrew language). Interwar Poland’s capital of Warsaw, uniquely, housed two PEN national organizations, for Polish- and Yiddish-language writers, respectively. The Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) was founded in 1925 in Vilnius (Wilno); that city had been seized in 1920 by the Poles from the Lithuanians, who had founded their nation-state’s capital there (no one cared to consult the Belarusians, who also wanted Vil’nia for their own capital). YIVO, which was operative until 1939, had for its main goal the compilation of a multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Yiddish language; the project foundered in the Holocaust, which destroyed the vast majority of Europe’s Yiddish-speaking communities. The initial four volumes of the unfinished Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh (1961-80) were published in New York. Eliezer Perlman (who later changed his name to Ben-Yehuda, 1858–1922), born and educated in the Vil’na Gubernia, emigrated to Ottoman Palestine, where he codified Ivrit (Modern Hebrew) in his multivolume authoritative dictionary of that language (Thesaurus totius hebraitatis et veteris et recentioris / Milon halashon haʻivrit hayashana ve hadasha, 1908-59). His contemporary L.L. Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Jew from the highly multilingual city of Belastok (Białystok, located in the former Poland-Lithuania’s geographical centre), hoped for universal and non-conflictual communication for all humans (although at first he had limited his ambition only to a common language for Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews). To this end, in 1887, he proposed the idea of Esperanto, which until today remains the most successful constructed language. Zamenhof settled in Warsaw and single-handedly translated the Bible and the basic canon of European literature into Esperanto (over 50 volumes in total). Esperanto was briefly the adopted language of a tiny neutral condominium on the German-Belgian border (Moresnet), and was on the way to become one of the League of Nations’ working languages until staunch French opposition blocked this possibility in 1924. Esperanto, Hebrew and Yiddish contain many Polish (Slavic) linguistic loans, while, conversely, Polish is replete with numerous Yiddish words and phrases. Intensive linguistic exchanges between these languages, and also with Belarusian and Russian, took place for the last time in interwar Soviet Belarus, where all these four languages were co-official between 1924 and 1938.
During the modern period, Roma (“Gypsies”) – who alongside Jews or Armenians had enjoyed a regular non-territorial autonomy in Poland-Lithuania – were marginalized, exoticized and stigmatized. Their language, Romani, has not been standardized to this day, while on the other hand the region’s poets and artists made Roma into a Romantic ethnotype of a free and “bohemian” people. Papusza (1908–1987) of the Polska Roma is the most celebrated Romani-language poet to date, notwithstanding her continuing obscurity in most of Europe. Her poetry, in Romani with the use of Polish orthography, was preserved by the Polish-language poet of Jewish origin Jerzy Ficowski (1924-2006), who also translated it into Polish; most of it remains untranslated into English or Europe’s other main languages.
