The Making of a Language: The Case of the Idiom of Wilamowice, Southern Poland (Trends in Linguistics. Documentation [TiLDOC], 19)

The book presents unique literature in a minority ethnolect – the Germanic dialect of Wilamowice in Southern Poland. The manuscripts, written in the ethnolect at the beginning of the 20th century, were discovered in 1989. The book contains full versions of several texts of various length written by Florian Biesik, who decided to create a literary standard for Wilamowicean in order to prove its non-German, but possibly Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, Flemish or Frisian origin. Thus it presents both the dialectal literature and the most important elements of the local culture during the final stages of its extinction. Acknowledgements 5 Abbreviations and symbols 7 1. Preliminaries 13 1.1. General introduction 13 1.2. Methodological remarks 15 2. Wilamowice as a linguistic enclave 17 2.1. The town of Wilamowice 17 2.2. The history of Wilamowice and its ethnolect 18 2.3. Literature on Bielsko-Biała and other Silesian German linguistic enclaves 25 3. Origin of the ethnolect 27 3.1. The Wilamowicean ethnotheory of origin 27 3.2. Translation of Biesik VIII. Wymysau an wymysojer 31 4. Literature in Wilamowicean 37 5. Florian Biesik 43 5.1. Florian Biesik’s manuscript 43 5.2. Illustrations 47 5.3. Florian Biesik’s introduction to BiesikI. Óf jer wełt 53 5.4. Florian Biesik’s biography 60 6. Florian Biesik’s texts 65 Biesik I. Óf jer wełt 65 Footnotes to BiesikI 279 Biesik II. Óm mjer 343 Footnotes to BiesikII 359 Biesik lll. S’wymysojerysze 364 Biesik lV. Dy drużba 367 Biesik V. S wymysojer mákia 370 Biesik VI. Dy “saison halykja” 372 Footnotes to Biesik VI 379 Biesik VII. S gre-gre-gregory 382 Biesik VIII. Wymysau an Wymysojer 385 Biesik lX. Dy nójy póterba?wa kultur 389 Footnotes to Biesik lX 399 Biesik X. S’wymysojer wunder 401 Footnotes to Biesik X 408 7. Orthographic and phonetic issues 411 8. Grammatical issues 425 8.1. Syntax 425 8.2. Morphology 426 8.3. Morphonology 434 9. Lexical semantics 437 9.1. Kinship terms 437 9.2. Family names 440 9.3. Christian names 443 9.4. Nicknames 444 9.5. Toponymics 445 10. Language archaisms and dialectisms 449 11. Ethnolinguistic issues 451 11.1. Folk costumes 451 11.2. Folk culture 453 11.3. Weaving industry and trade 454 11.4. Folk mythology 455 11.5. Local cuisine 456 11.6. Religious life 457 11.7. Polish patriotism, anti-Germanism and anti-Semitism 457 Endnotes 459 Appendices 469 Index of persons referred to in Biesik’s poems 469 Index of words and forms used in Biesik’s poems not recorded in Mojmir’s dictionary 473 Phonetic transcription (first 36 stanzas of Óf jer wełl) 479 Florian Biesik’s texts published by Heinrich Anders (1933) 485 References 535 "The book presents unique literature in a minority ethnolect - the Germanic dialect of Wilamowice in Southern Poland. The manuscripts, written in the ethnolect at the beginning of the 20th century, were discovered in 1989. The book contains full versions of several texts of various length written by Florian Biesik, who decided to create a literary standard for Wilamowicean in order to prove its non-German, but possibly Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, Flemish or Frisian origin. Thus it presents both the dialectal literature and the most important elements of the local culture during the final stages of its extinction."--BOOK JACKET Volumes in the Trends in Linguistics. Documentation series focus on the presentation of linguistic data. The series addresses the sustained interest in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, grammars and editions of under-described and hitherto undocumented languages. All world-regions and time periods are represented.