ABSTRACT
My interest in languages and what they really are goes back to my childhood. Now with the privilege of hindsight I can see that I was born and raised in a multiethnic and polyglot region in communist Poland. Upper Silesia retained this character, despite the series of vast acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing visited on Central Europe during the twentieth century by the totalitarian regimes of wartime Germany and the Soviet Union. In the latter case such policies were pursued before, during, and after World War Two. All these processes of radical “demographic engineering” heavily impacted Upper Silesia. The ideological goal and undisputed ideal was to produce homogenous societies (nations), housed in their own unshared homelands (nation-states), where a single language (national tongue) would be in exclusive use across all spheres of public and private life. This elusive homogeneity (“purity”) was defined in (pseudo) racial terms in the Third Reich, and by a sense of social classlessness in the Soviet Union. However, across Central Europe, to this day, ethnolinguistic nationalism has remained the most popular benchmark and source of “real” homogeneity, seen as the proper basis for the creation, legitimation, and maintenance of national statehood. In this view Language = Nation = State. Ethnolinguistic homogeneity is the hallmark of the true nation-state.
