The article presents initial findings from a research project that aims to investigate to what extent German loan words are still in use in Silesian today. Over the centuries, Silesian has adopted far more loan words from German than any other dialect on Polish territory. The project focuses on speakers of Silesian and analyses their so-called subjective frequency of usage of specific Silesian Germanisms in comparison with synonymous words in Standard Polish. Nearly 700 word pairs are tested. The estimates of usage frequency are correlated with the respondents’ sociodemographic data and their so-called language attitudes towards Silesian and its position in Silesian-Polish society. The question of how Germanisms are treated is a central issue in the current discussion on the codification of Silesian.

The Nowogródek i okolice [Nowogródek and environs] tourist guide by Józef Żmigrodzki occasionally reveals some phonetic features typical for North-Eastern Borderlands Polish (rznięty, najprzód, szkarpa), peculiar noun inflections (uczni, soft instead of hard adjectival stem – bezleśni), peculiar adjectival and adverbial gradation forms (najpamiętniejszy, najkonieczniejszy, szczególniej), emphasising word using the -ż particle (temuż). Typical word formation features include the adverbial suffix -o instead of -’e (zaledwo) and 23 peculiar prefixed verbs (e.g. pobudować – zbudować ). Syntax features present in the work include a total of 6 language structures: adjective/participle predicate in the locative instead of nominative case (2), historic non-compound form of the passive participle in the predicate (1), verbs governing unusual cases (3). Word material is much more abundant, with 63 single lexical units, 6 peculiar phrases and 1 peculiar expression.
The text of Żmigrodzki’s book undoubtedly bears witness to the North-Eastern Borderlands heritage of its author. Other interwar writings originating from the North-Eastern Borderlands should be the subject of linguistic studies as well.

The article concerns patriotic threads in the Upper Silesian press concerning the upbringing of children at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The subject of the description are the magazines “Rodzina” and “Katolik” from the years 1890–1918. The analysis included the observed elements of upbringing constituting components of patriotism: cultivation of the mother tongue, love for the homeland, memory of history, appreciation of acts of heroism, readiness to sacrifice for the country as well as cultivation of the system of values. The background for the considerations was the historical reality, reflected in the presented content. The basis of the description was the linguistic image of the world and the category of evaluation, which made it possible to indicate the scope of linguistic elements of patriotic upbringing.

The article discusses a regional variety of Polish spoken in Kiyv preserved in the Polish-Latin panegyrics composed by Stefan Jaworski (1656(8)–1722) to venerate Warłam Jasiński. The analysis aims at drawing a catalogue of phonetic, inflectional, word formation and syntactic idiolectal features of this variety as juxtaposed against the 17th century standard Polish. The analysis reveals the poet’s fluency in a language that was foreign (second) to him. This fluency also covers the poet’s skill in using varietal forms to achieve artistic aims. The regional forms subject to the study often display closeness to the ones in the Borderland variety of Polish, yet with an idiolectal inflectional features, e.g.: a large number of participles ending in -owszy or frequent cases of l/ł alternation.

The article analyses the vocabulary and phraseology of Dyszkurs o grzechách szostego przykazánia Bożego… written by Adam Gdacjusz, the Kluczbork clergyman. The text was published in 1682 in Jan Krzysztof Jakub’s printing press in Brzeg. Gdacjusz is qualified as the 17th century representative of the Silesian Polish. In this particular text he writes about the issue of promiscuity, adultery and sinuous conduct.
The lexis and phraseology of the Dyszkurs… is characterised by explicit expressiveness, vividness and diversity. The author is known for his rapid style of rhetoric and crudeness that he achieves by the careful selection of words, with which he strikes the reader emphasising the brutal power hidden within them. Such a method requires frequent repetitions, rehashes, and a peculiar kind of redundancy, especially in the case of exempla. The text surprises the reader with the multitude of names associated with human sexual life. Gdacjusz enumerates and discusses the reasons for prostitution, yielding to the sin of dissoluteness, and immoral conduct. The colourfulness and vividness of the Kluczbork preacher’s text is also influenced by the various idiomatic expressions, sayings, proverbs and numerous colloquialisms taken directly from the language spoken by the Kluczbork dwellers of that time. Lexis built in this way adds authenticity and expression to his deliverance. What is important, some words and idioms still function today. In his sermons, Gdacjusz both fulfils the requirements of the preacher’s rhetoric and links simplicity with sophistication on the lexical layer. A sublime and elevated style of his utterance interweaves with the sharp, plain, and sometimes even coarse tone of preaching. Therefore, Adam Gdacjusz’ oeuvre stands out from other Silesian preachers and contributes significantly to the 17th-century Silesian Protestant literature.

This article, for the first time in scientific literature, presents comments about the language of documents of the Grodno Zemstvo Court, the oldest in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. These documents were written in the 16th century in Cyrillic and published in XVII vol. of the Act of the Vilna Archaeographic Commission. The article presents promising directions for the study of these documents, and special attention is paid to the impact on their vocabulary of the Polish language and the functioning of the Belarusian dialects of the Grodno region.

Past participles (ending with -n (-an, -en), and -t) and the group of adjectives referred to in Croatian linguistics as true adjectives are similar regarding their syntactic structure. The paper analyses the collocation potential of the past participles based on data from the Croatian Collocation Database (http://ihjj.hr/kolokacije/english/) developed at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics. The article describes both the use of the past participles in the multiword units in Croatian and their status in contemporary Croatian dictionaries. What is described are the criteria for distinguishing the past participles as morphological forms of the verb headword from the lexicalised adjectives that should have the status of independent headwords in the dictionary.

The industrialisation of the Upper Silesia, development of new towns and industrial settlements, and various methods of Germanisation applied to the society caused changes in the ethnic structure of this region and strengthened the position of the German language there. The major opponent to German was the Silesian dialect used both by town dwellers and countrymen in their families and neighbouring communities, and also by the scarce representatives of the Silesian intelligentsia.
The differences between the village slang and that of the people living in towns were mainly connected with vocabulary which, especially in the industrious centres, was exposed to strong German influence. The common language of the intelligentsia was that of a mixed character; it included many phonetic dialectical characteristics, even though irregularly used ones. The general Polish language was known passively, but not used. It was the language of the prayer books, songs, sermons, calendars, and magazines printed by the local publishing houses. All of these factors created a specific linguistic situation which was based on the following issue: in the Silesia of the second half of the 19th century, the opposition of spoken language versus the language of printed texts equalled the opposition of dialect versus the literary Polish language.

This article addresses the skills involved in processing humour. Both adults and children enjoy puns, jokes, and riddles and employ humour in interaction with friends. Factors that contribute to understanding humour involve cognition, the ability to identify a speaker’s intent to convey humour, and the desire to engage in social interaction. Humour can be found in all countries across the globe, though cultural and linguistic differences may influence what listeners consider humorous. Moreover, some listeners have difficulty processing or understanding humour. The article also outlines studies investigating humour understanding and appreciation in relation to autistic spectrum disorders.

The text is a brief description of the history of the Irena Bajerowa Institute of the Polish Language that existed between 1977 and 2019. The beginnings of linguistics in Katowice date back to the 1960s and were connected with the research activity of the most prominent representatives of linguistics in Poland (Witold Mańczak, Maria Honowska, Irena Bajerowa, Kazimierz Polański, Walery Pisarek) who had been educated at the Jagiellonian University. The research work of the Department of the Polish Language, which existed back then, concentrated mainly on diachronic issues and the problems of contemporary word formation and syntax.
The foundation of the University of Silesia in 1968 expedited the academic development of the aforementioned linguistic society, which contributed to a philological community of a great potential. In the 70s, the Faculty of Philology was created, whereas the Institute of the Polish Language was established in its structure. This institution gathered many outstanding researchers, often including the precursors of new trends in the Polish academia, such as generative grammar, sociolinguistics, linguistic stylistics. Numerous groundbreaking studies and journals, Socjolingwistyka and Język Artystyczny, were published there as well.
The activity of the remarkable linguists and their students contributed to the formation of the research approaches well-known in Poland and abroad, including historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and stylistics. In 2016, the Institute of the Polish Language was given the name of Irena Bajerowa, that is, the researcher who was closely connected with Silesian linguistic community, who inspired this community to think comprehensively about language and linguistics, and who took care of its academic development.