Całościowe badania społeczności językowych

Abstract

Comprehensive Research on Speech Communities
Einar Haugen’s theory of “ecology of language”, also known as ecolinguistics and linguistic ecology, is an interdisciplinary approach within linguistic studies. The description of language with its “environment”, i.e. speech community, its history, economic and political situation, legal status and other features, is an important part of many research reports in sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. Despite of the usefulness of non-structural factors in linguistic analysis, one has to admit that many scholars, not only representatives of social sciences but also linguists, tend to concentrate on the sociological or anthropological part of ecolinguistic studies and neglect the question of linguistic phenomena or significantly reduce their description. However, there are certain studies from the field of linguistic ecology which can be characterized as comprehensive approaches in the research on speech communities, where socio-cultural and linguistic questions are paid equal attention. One of the most detailed research reports in this field is Tadeusz Lewaszkiewicz’s monograph on the language of resettlers from Navahrudak and its surroundings after the World War II. This in-depth study of a speech community is a rare example of a multifaceted analysis of idiolectal and generational evolution of the Polish language of the Eastern Borderlands.