Czego Zenon Klemensiewicz nie napisał o języku polskim w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym, czyli dlaczego potrzebne jest nowe opracowanie dziejów polszczyzny w latach 1918–1939

Abstract

What Zenon Klemensiewicz Did Not Write About the Polish Language in the Interwar Period, or Why Is There a Need for a New Synthesis of the History of Polish Between 1918 and 1939

The article formulates a postulate of a new synthesis of the history of the Polish language in the years 1918–1939, and presents reasons that justify this need. The interwar period has been described in the third volume of Z. Klemensiewicz’s History of the Polish Language (Pol. Historia języka polskiego) as the closing phase of the New Polish period. Such classification of this brief period in the history of Polish might be the reason why it has attracted little interest from historians studying the language, and why the centre of gravity of linguistic research has shifted to the period after 1945 which Klemensiewicz presented as the time of great changes in the Polish language. Klemensiewicz’s work, whose third volume was published in 1974, ignores numerous important issues which characterize the sociopolitical background of the development of Polish and the attitude towards the language. These are primarily issues connected to multinationality and multilingualism, including the problem of bilingual education with the language of instruction being a minority language, and the question of language policy. A wider range of sources needs to be included in historical and linguistic research into the interwar period, as the existing literature is mainly only familiar with the topics popularized by contemporary language correctness journals such as Poradnik Językowy or Język Polski.