Texan Silesian

Texan Silesian[lower-alpha 1] is a dialect of the Silesian language used by descendants of immigrant Silesian Poles in American settlements from 1852[1] to the present. The speakers of the dialect came to America from the area of Płużnica Wielka, Strzelce Opolskie and Toszek in Opolian Silesia.[2] The dialect evolved around the area of the unincorporated community of Panna Maria in Karnes County, Texas[3] which is considered by the Texas State Historical Association "the oldest permanent Polish settlement in America and as the home of the nation's oldest Polish church and school."[1][4] Another significant settlement in which Texan Silesian is present is neighboring Cestohowa.

An example of Texan Silesian is a letter written from Texas to Poland in c. 1855. It is written in the standard Polish orthography of the time, with marked use of nasal vowels.

Location of Karnes County, Texas, where Texan Silesian is spoken

Texan Silesian is substantially less influenced by German because its speakers emigrated before the Kulturkampf, a government campaign of Germanization enacted by the German Empire, which added many Germanisms to the Silesian dialect within said country's pre-1914 state borders.[5] The language is kept alive by its current speakers, but they know it only in its spoken form.[5] Texan Silesian has not been replaced by English as a spoken language by the older generations of the Panna Maria area, because the local Silesian Polish community was historically strongly isolated. Nevertheless, Texan Silesian has adopted some words from English.

One of the characteristic features of Texan Silesian phonetics is called mazuration, a widespread linguistic process within Polish language, especially extant in rular areas, in which postalveolar fricatives and affricates (Polish cz, sz, ż, dż) are pronounced [t͡s, s, z, d͡z], whereas in the Silesian dialect of the Katowice urban area they are pronounced [t͡ʂ, ʂ, ʐ, d͡ʐ]. Mazuration was already present in Texan Silesian Another phonetic peculiarity of the dialect is its more recent denasalization. For example, nasal vovel [ɛ̃], still common in modern Polish and present in Texan Silesian of the 19th century, became oral vovel [ɛ] or diphone [an], differently to most other Silesian dialects, in which denasalization of [ɛ̃] produced diphone [ɨn]. This might suggest that Texan Silesian split from other Silesian dialects before denasalization process began. A visible product of those language changes is the name of the settlement of Cestohowa. Its name is derived from Częstochowa, a city of large religious importance within Poland, but, due to phonetic processes mentioned above, cz was written as c, while ę as e.[2]