Celebrating Wymysorys: Revitalizing a Language and Identity in Southern Poland
Tiöma fum Dökter is building the first-ever textbook for his language, illuminated by a corpus of mother-tongue oral histories, folk stories, and traditional music.
This post was written by Wikitongues intern Daniele Basalone.
Finding Tiöma fum Dökter is not difficult. First, travel to Wilamowice, in southwestern Poland. The town has a unique character which sets its traditional dress, architecture, and music apart from the rest of Poland; however, as you walk around the center of the town, home to about 3,000 people, you will hear almost entirely Polish. Keep listening closely, and eventually you might notice another language, one which may at first sound something like German but certainly not like Polish. You have probably already found Tiöma fum Dökter, either in the middle of conducting ethnographic research or having a chat with one of the 20 native speakers of the language you noticed, Wymysorys. If this isn’t Tiöma, the speakers certainly know where to find him. As the youngest native speaker of Wymysorys and the driving force behind the language’s revitalization, he can often be found around Wilamowice collecting data and organizing a growing language community.
There was a time when hearing Polish in the town would have been almost as rare as hearing Wymysorys today. In the 13th century, a group of colonists from Germany and Flanders moved into southwestern Poland, between the regions of Silesia and Lesser Poland. According to some scholars, they went because the Silesian dukes at the time had incentivized immigration following the devastation of the Mongol invasions earlier in the century. This move put their Germanic language into direct contact with the Slavic languages of Poland. Among the settlements founded during this period is Wilamowice, which has sat for eight centuries on the shifting border between the Germanic west and the Slavic east. For nearly a millennia, the vernaculars developed in this region have been shaping the political, religious, and cultural lives of their speakers.
These Germanic vernaculars formed what is known as the Bielsko-Biała linguistic enclave, which at its greatest extent stretched even into Silesia. The borders of this enclave have retreated from that high water mark, but several ancestor languages of the original Middle German spoken at the time of colonization remained until the 1940s, including Wymysorys, the descendent of the language spoken by the founders of Wilamowice. The languages of neighboring towns, also descended from the same 13th-century settlement event, have disappeared from Poland since the end of the Second World War.
The survival of Wymysorys is certainly due in part to the complicated self-identification of the Vilamovians. More so than some other descendents of colonial Germans, the Vilamovians assumed a unique identity — one neither German nor Polish. As Tiöma says of his language, “It didn’t want to be German, it didn’t want to be Polish.” Vilamovians regarded their language as obviously distinct from Standard German, which was also spoken in neighboring areas until the 1940s. Although the town was in different political polities throughout its history, at some times under the rule of Polish-speakers, at other times under German-speakers, Vilamovians continued to use Wymysorys as an everyday vernacular. The Polonization of Wilamowice truly began in the late 19th century in the form of Polish schools and religious services, continuing into the 20th century and the reformation of Poland after the First World War. During the interwar period, Polonization continued, but the state generally adopted a neutral attitude toward the Wymysorys and its related languages. The non-German identity of Vilamovians also played a part in shielding their language from direct attempts at Polonization. The German invasion of Poland in 1939 began a Germanization of Wymysorys. Teachers delivered lessons and priests said mass in Standard German. Despite being related languages, this Standard German influence on Wymysorys can still be detected in the speech of those older Vilamovians who attended the German schools.
Wymysorys would experience its sharpest decline in use in the decades after the war. The Polish state was liberated, and it brought back Polish as the official language of instruction and religion. The communist regime that followed pursued a program of persecution against any peoples perceived as “Germanic,” including the Vilamovians, and they began arresting and deporting people of the Bielsko-Biała enclave. Some scholars argue that Wymysorys survived this violent period — unlike many neighboring languages — because the Vilamovians had for many centuries not considered themselves German, and thus were not enthusiastic about the wartime occupation. Despite this, even after many were attacked and deported to labor camps, some losing their lives, the remaining Vilamovians were subjected to severe punishments for using Wymysorys and wearing traditional clothing.
The Polish government’s oppression of Germanic elements waned through the 20th century, eventually ending with the collapse of communism in Poland in 1989. Unfortunately, the more than forty years of forced Polonization had created a generation of Vilamovians that were not able to learn Wymysorys from their parents. Moreover, the land around Wilamowice was no longer populated by speakers of other Germanic languages.
This is the situation into which Tiöma was born. Today there are 20 native speakers of Wymysorys, almost entirely elderly. As the youngest native speaker of Wymysorys he certainly represents a special reemergence of the language, but he learned it in the way we all learn our first languages; by listening to the people around us. Although actually Silesian by descent, Tiöma learned Wymysorys from the nanny who helped raise him who he refers to as “Grandma.” This woman was a part of the larger community of Wymysorys speakers, many of whom Tiöma also grew up around. “It was normal that people spoke Wymysorys,” he says. Of course it would have also been normal that people spoke Polish, which was the language Tiöma went to school in, and the language he spoke to many of his childhood friends in.
He noticed early in his life the linguistic situation of Wilamowice and was unsatisfied that the language of his earliest memories was not more widespread in his community. “I decided at the age of five to revitalize the language,” he says. His original strategy was to engage his friends in informal language learning, trying to teach them some useful words when he had the opportunity. He then began connecting young people who wanted to learn their heritage language with older people who knew the language. Formal language classes began soon after. Throughout his teenage years he developed word lists and created a video archive with several hundred hours of video and audio. As he grew up and eventually went on to study linguistics and anthropology, he developed more sophisticated tools to study his language. He authored two technical grammars of Wymysorys and began to contribute to the Revitalizing Endangered Languages project, which aims to create a universally applicable model for language revitalization. Other activists and scholars of Wymysorys include Justyna Olko, who studies the health and economic benefits of linguistic vitality, and Justyna Majerska-Sznajder, the president of the Wilamowice cultural revitalization organization “Wilamowianie.”
Tiöma’s latest project is an upcoming book of oral histories and stories gathered in Wymysorys and transcribed along with their English and Polish translations. Much of the work of this project is being undertaken by youth in Wilamowice, who are responsible for making the recordings and transcriptions. This puts them into direct contact with the oldest generation of Wymysorys speakers and improves their language skills. He says this project is especially necessary after the Covid-19 pandemic isolated the younger and older generations. Moreover, Tiöma argues that oral history is characterized by the language used to transmit it. That is, repeating the history of the Vilamovians in Polish neglects an essential component of that history. It makes it feel remote or foreign to Vilamovian youth. Transmitting the same history in Wymysorys instead creates a sense of continued identity between the newest generation, the oldest generation, and even the original colonists of the 13th century.
Tiöma is satisfied knowing that his work has strengthened the feeling of community in Wilamowice, regardless of the language they speak. He envisions a successful revitalization of Wymysorys will come with education reform. The current teaching programs are aimed at second language learners, but ideally Tiöma wants Wymysorys to be a language of primary instruction. Continued transmission of all cultural elements is essential to reclaiming the original identity of the town, something that Tiöma knows he can achieve by keeping Vilamovian youths in contact with the older generation. He is especially excited about the newly coined words and unique speech patterns of young learners. They are signs of innovation and commitment to using Wymysorys. “Maybe in 50 years there could be a group,” he says. From this core group, the language could once again be taught to subsequently larger generations of children, until once again Wymysorys is a common sound in Wilamowice.
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