Silesian, occasionally called Upper Silesian, is an ethnolect of the Lechitic group spoken in Upper Silesia. While having secured some international recognition as a language, there is a debate on whether Silesian is either a dialect of Polish or a distinct language, and if Silesians are either a regional ethnic group within the Polish nation or a distinct ethnic minority that historically emerged, but later diverged from, the Polish people. Some Silesians identify as a regional ethnic group within the Polish nation, while others view themselves as a distinct ethnic minority. Its vocabulary was significantly influenced by Central German due to the existence of numerous Silesian German speakers in the area prior to World War II and after.Tomasz Kamusella. 2013. The Silesian Language in the Early 21st Century: A Speech Community on the Rollercoaster of Politics (pp 1–35). Die Welt der Slaven. Vol 58, No 1. The first mentions of Silesian as a distinct lect date back to the 16th century, and the first literature with Silesian characteristics to the 17th century.
Linguistic distinctiveness of Silesian has long been a topic of discussion among Poland's linguists, especially after all of Upper Silesia was included within the Polish borders following World War II. Some regard it as one of the four major dialects of Polish,„Słownik gwar Śląskich". Opole, Bogusław Wyderka (eds.)„Dialekt śląski" author: Feliks Pluta, publication: Wczoraj, Dzisiaj, Jutro. – 1996, no 1/4, pp 5–19„Fenomen śląskiej gwary" author: Jan Miodek publication: Śląsk. – 1996, no 5, pp 52 while others classify it as a separate regional language, distinct from Polish.Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford 1996 pp 1233 The dispute over the status of Silesian is considered to be of purely political character.: These examples amply show that it is politics (that is, ethnolinguistic nationalism) only which prevents the recognition of Silesian as a language in Poland. To take at the face value the Polish administration’s claims that Silesian cannot be recognized as a language, due to its underdevelopment in the sphere of grammar standardization and writing, this stance entails a proposal that in the world there are not more than about 200 languages meriting status as ‘a language’. According to the official data from the 2021 Polish census, 467 145 people use Silesian on daily basis. Referring to Silesian as an ethnolect (which could be either a dialect or a language) has been recommended as a neutral term. Internationally, Silesian has been fully recognized as a language since 2007, when it was accorded the ISO 639-3 registration code szl.Silesian szl. Ethnologue.: A year earlier, in 2007, in reply to Andrzyj Roczniok and Grzegorz Kozubek’s (initially, the editor of Ślůnsko Nacyjo) application, SIL (tasked with registering the world’s all languages in line with the ISO 639-3 standard) recognized Silesian and conferred the szl code on it.
Several efforts have been made for Silesian to gain recognition as an official regional language in Poland. Shortly before the 2007 election, the MPs of Samoobrona, LPR, RLN and PSL submitted a bill recognizing Silesian as a regional language in Poland, but the Sejm was dissolved before it could have been passed. Subsequent stillborn attempts were made in 2010 and 2012. In 2011, the ECRML recommended that Poland recognizes Silesian as a language. In 2014, a citizens' bill signed by 140,000 citizens was submitted to the Sejm, but was rejected; similar bills were voted down in 2018 and 2020. In 2023, another bill was prepared but was not voted upon because the Sejm's term ended and the election was called. In April 2024, the Sejm took a significant step by passing a bill recognizing Silesian as a regional language, but the bill was vetoed by President Andrzej Duda on 29 May 2024. In January 2026, the Sejm again once passed the bill recognizing it as such, but it was vetoed by President Karol Nawrocki on 12 February 2026.
Distribution Silesian speakers currently live in the region of Upper Silesia, which is split between southwestern Poland and the northeastern Czech Republic. At present Silesian is commonly spoken in the area between the historical border of Silesia on the east and a line from Syców to Prudnik on the west as well as in the Rawicz area.
Until 1945, Silesian was also spoken in enclaves in Lower Silesia, where the majority spoke Lower Silesian, a variety of Central German. The German-speaking population was either evacuated en masse by German forces towards the end of the war or deported by the new administration upon the Polish annexation of the Silesian Recovered Territories after its end. Before World War II, most Slavic-language speakers also knew German and, at least in eastern Upper Silesia, many German speakers were acquainted with Slavic Silesian.
According to the last official census in Poland in 2021, about 460,000 people declared Silesian as their native language, whereas in the country's census of 2011, the figure was about 510,000. In the censuses in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, nearly 527,000 people declared Silesian nationality; Upper Silesia has almost five million inhabitants, with the vast majority speaking Polish in the Polish part and declaring themselves to be Poles and the vast majority speaking Czech in the Czech part and declaring themselves to be Czechs.National Minorities in the Slovak Republic – Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic
Grammar
Although the morphological differences between Silesian and Polish have been researched extensively, other grammatical differences have not been studied in depth.
A notable difference is in question-forming. In standard Polish, questions which do not contain interrogative words are formed either by using intonation or the interrogative particle . In Silesian, questions which do not contain interrogative words are formed by using intonation (with a markedly different intonation pattern than in Polish) or inversion (e.g. ); there is no interrogative particle.
Example Silesian – Central dialectSilesian – Cieszyn dialectPolishCzechSlovakEnglish
Dialects of Silesian
The Silesian language consists of a number of dialects, broadly classified into three groups; northern, central and southern. Per Alfred Zaręba, these dialects are further divided as follows: Northern dialects: Kluczbork (1) Opole (2) Niemodlin (3) Central dialects: Prudnik (4) Gliwice (5) Borderland Silesian-Lesser Polish dialects (6): Gliwice-Opole-Lesser Poland Borderland (a) Silesian-Lesser Polish Borderland (b) Southern dialects: Cieszyn (7) Jablunkov (8) Borderland Silesian-Lach (9)
According to the 2021 census, majority of native speakers of the Cieszyn dialect don’t consider their speech a part of separate Silesian language, but rather Polish (less than 1% of Cieszyn Silesian speakers consider it part of Silesian language, the rest Polish), reflecting historical differences between former Prussian and Austrian Silesia, where Polish identity was historically strong, in 1848 Cieszyn Silesians expressed: "Considering that here we speak the Polish language and have Polish nationality, many voices among us already wish for our part of Silesia to be united with the Kraków governorate."
Historically, the dialectal distribution also included the Chwalim dialect, part of the Lower Silesian dialect group. This dialect formed the northernmost boundary of the Silesian language and influenced nearby new mixed dialects until its extinction in the 20th century.
Dialect vs. language
Politicization Opinions are divided among linguists regarding whether Silesian is a distinct language, a dialect of Polish, or, in the case of Lach, a variety of Czech. The issue can be contentious, because some Silesians consider themselves to be a distinct nationality within Poland. When Czechs, Poles, and Germans each made claims to substantial parts of Silesia as constituting an integral part of their respective nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries, the language of Slavic-speaking Silesians became politicized.
Rudolf Abicht, a Slavicist of Upper Silesian extraction who worked at the University of Breslau and proposed an early standardization of the Belarusian language, clearly recognized that standardizing and making Silesian into a language is a socio-political process. In 1920, he expressed his opinion on the subject in an extensive essay on the 'Upper Silesian language question.'Rudolf Absicht. 1920. Die oberschlesische Sprachenfrage im Lichte der Sprachwissenschaft (Part 1) (p. 1). Der Oberschlesier, Vol. 2, No. 34, 21 August.Rudolf Absicht. 1920. Die oberschlesische Sprachenfrage im Lichte der Sprachwissenschaft (Part 2) (pp. 2-3). Der Oberschlesier, Vol. 2, No. 36, 4 September.
Some, like Óndra Łysohorsky (a poet and author in Czechoslovakia), saw the Silesians as their own distinct people, which culminated in his effort to create a literary standard which he called the "Lachian language". Silesian inhabitants supporting the cause of each of these ethnic groups had their own robust network of supporters across Silesia's political borders which shifted over the course of the 20th century prior to the large-scale ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of World War II.
In 2009, Wojciech Janicki argued that the issue is centred around political considerations, and linguistic arguments represent a post-hoc rationalization for political stances. He stated that the arguments given by linguists who oppose recognizing Silesian a language often "support the thesis of the presence of a separate Silesian language quite unintentionally and accidentally". Janicki brings up the examples of Polish ethnologist Krzysztof Kwaśniewski who stated that "national language is what people speaking it claim and not what linguists judge", and linguist Bogusław Wyderka, who "demonstrates that for 95 per cent of Silesians, their dialect is their primary code, so it exists as a means of identification".
In 2011, Tomasz Kamusella and Andrzej Roczniok published a Silesian-language article on the standardization of the Silesian language.T. D. Kamusella & A. Roczniok. 2011. Sztandaryzacyjo ślōnski godki / Standaryzacja języka śląskiego (pp. 288-294). In Lingvokul’turnoe prostranstvo sovremennoi Evropy cherez prizmu malykh i bolshikh iazykov. K 70-letiiu professora Aleksandra Dimitrievicha Dulichenko. Slavica Tartuensis, Vol. 9. Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University.
In 2016, Kamusella argued that the reason for politicization of the Silesian debate is that a part of the Polish national myth is ethnolinguistic homogeneity, one which recognizing Silesians and/or their language as separate from Polish endangers:
In turn, linguists who consider Silesian a dialect view the decision to classify it as a separate language as politically motivated, comparing it to the dispute of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian as either separate languages or dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Polish linguist Jerzy Bralczyk, despite his political opposition to President Andrzej Duda, supported his veto of a bill that would recognize Silesian as a regional language, arguing classifying Silesian as a language is motivated by political considerations. Professor Bralczyk criticized the decision of the 2024 government to draft the bill, stating that "neither Prime Minister Tusk nor Marshal Hołownia are linguists, which is why I do not approve of their conflict-generating comments driven by political motives", contending that "Silesian remains a dialect rather than a separate language."
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