Latest / The Story of Poland: A Nation That Refused to Disappear — Fexingo History / The Polish Language That Refused to Die: Language, Identity, and Survival
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've covered a lot of ground in this series — battles, kings, commonwealths, partitions. But there's something that runs through all of it, something that's almost invisible but absolutely central to Poland's survival as a nation: the Polish language itself. Luna: The language? How do you mean? Lucas: Think about it — Poland disappeared from the map for 123 years. No state, no borders, no government. But people still spoke Polish at home, in church, in secret. And that everyday act of speaking became a form of resistance. Language was the thread that kept the nation together when everything else was taken away. Luna: So it's not just about words — it's about identity. Lucas: Exactly. And it wasn't automatic. The partitioning powers — Prussia, Austria, Russia — all tried to suppress Polish. They banned it from schools, from administration, from public life. But the response was fascinating. Poles created underground schools, secret libraries, even a whole system of clandestine education called tajne komplety — 'secret classes' — that operated right under the noses of the authorities. Luna: Wait — tajne komplety, that's the secret teaching network from the partitions? I've heard about it in the context of World War Two, too. Lucas: Same term, different era. During the 19th century partitions, and again under Nazi occupation, Poles organized secret classes in private homes. Teachers risked deportation or worse to teach Polish literature, history, even basic reading and writing. It's one of the most remarkable stories of educational resistance anywhere. Lucas: But let's back up a bit. The Polish language has a long pedigree. It's a West Slavic language, closely related to Czech and Slovak. The earliest written Polish sentence dates to the 13th century — 'Daj, ać ja pobruszę, a ty poczywaj' — 'Let me grind, and you rest.' Found in a Latin manuscript. Luna: That's surprisingly domestic. A little snapshot of everyday life. Lucas: Right. And for centuries, Latin was the language of the elite, of the church, of official documents. Polish was spoken but not written much. That started to change in the 16th century — the Renaissance. Writers like Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski began publishing in Polish, proving it could handle poetry, philosophy, everything Latin could. Luna: So the golden age of Polish literature coincides with the golden age of the Commonwealth. Lucas: It does. But then came the partitions. After 1795, the Polish language faced a coordinated assault. In the Prussian partition, German became the language of instruction. In the Russian partition, after the 1830 and 1863 uprisings, Russification intensified — Polish was banned from schools, from courts, even from street signs. The Austrians were a bit more lenient in Galicia, but still. Lucas: One of the most heartbreaking episodes is the Września children's strike in 1901. In the town of Września — in German, Wreschen — Polish children refused to answer questions in German during religion class. They were beaten, kept after school, even imprisoned. Their parents protested and were fined or jailed. It became a national cause célèbre. Luna: Children striking for their language. That's incredible — and awful. Lucas: And it worked, in a way. The strike spread to other towns, and it drew international attention. It showed that the language issue wasn't just administrative — it was deeply personal, even for kids. Lucas: But there was another side: the effort to actively develop and modernize Polish. In the 19th century, intellectuals like Stanisław Staszic and Józef Mianowski worked to create Polish scientific and technical vocabulary. The Duchy of Warsaw, a short-lived Polish state created by Napoleon in 1807, established a ministry of education — the Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, actually a continuation of the earlier Commission of National Education founded in 1773, which was the first ministry of education in Europe. Luna: So even a small, dependent state could do a lot for the language. Lucas: Exactly. And then there's émigré literature. After the failed November Uprising of 1830, thousands of Polish intellectuals and artists fled to France, Britain, the Americas. The Great Emigration, they called it. And from exile, they wrote — poetry, plays, epics — all in Polish. Adam Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in Paris in 1834, the national epic of Poland. It begins with a longing for the homeland: 'Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!' — 'Lithuania! My fatherland!' — because for him, the old Commonwealth included Lithuania. Lucas: That book became a touchstone. Generations of Poles read it in secret, memorized it, recited it. It kept the language alive and gave it a literary standard that could stand alongside any other. Luna: It's almost like the language itself was a kind of portable homeland. Lucas: That's exactly how many Poles felt. The writer and activist Tomasz Zan once said, 'If you lose your language, you lose your nation.' And they believed that. Lucas: When Poland finally regained independence in 1918, one of the first tasks was to unify the language across all three former partitions, where different dialects and even alphabets had developed. In the Russian partition, Polish had sometimes been written in the Cyrillic alphabet — a deliberate Russification tactic. So standardizing the Latin script was a priority. Luna: Cyrillic for Polish? That must have felt like a violation. Lucas: It did. So after 1918, the government launched a massive literacy campaign. By 1939, Poland had one of the highest literacy rates in the region — about 77 percent, compared to maybe 40 percent at independence. That's a huge leap in just two decades. Luna: And all that happened while the country was also fighting wars and building institutions from scratch. Lucas: Yes. Then came World War Two, and the Nazis tried to destroy Polish culture systematically. They closed universities, executed professors, banned Polish-language publications. In the territories they annexed, they even tried to Germanize place names and family names. But the secret classes — tajne komplety — came back, bigger than ever. Luna: I've read that by 1944, there were over 100,000 students in secret classes in occupied Poland. Lucas: That's right. And they weren't just basic literacy — they included university-level courses in medicine, law, engineering. The University of Warsaw operated underground. Professors held lectures in private apartments. Students took exams in secret. It was a whole parallel education system, and it kept an entire generation of Poles educated in their own language. Lucas: Now, I want to pivot slightly to something I find really interesting — the influence of other languages on Polish. Polish has absorbed a lot of words from Latin, from German, from Czech, from French, even from Turkish and Italian. For example, the Polish word for 'city' — miasto — is related to 'place', but the word for 'town' — rynek — comes from German 'Ring'. And 'szkoła' — school — from Latin 'schola'. Luna: So Polish is a bit of a linguistic melting pot. Lucas: It is. But it never lost its Slavic core. And that core became a symbol of resistance. During the communist era after 1945, the government imposed Russian as a compulsory second language and tried to push Russian loanwords into Polish. But again, the language adapted. People used Polish equivalents, kept their own idioms, and the Russian influence remained superficial. Lucas: And here's a small aside — but I think it's telling. In the 19th century, when Polish was banned in schools in the Russian partition, parents would sometimes teach their children to read using the Bible or prayer books. That's because religious instruction was often exempt from the ban. So the Catholic Church became a protector of the Polish language. Luna: That makes sense — the church had a certain autonomy, even under Russian rule. Lucas: Exactly. And that's part of why Polish survived while other languages, like Upper Sorbian or Kashubian — which are also West Slavic — came under much more pressure. Polish had a critical mass of speakers, a literary tradition, and institutional support from the church and the émigré community. Lucas: I think one of the most beautiful things is that today, Polish is spoken by about 40 million people in Poland and another 10 million in the diaspora. It's the most widely spoken West Slavic language. And it's still changing — absorbing English words now, like 'komputer' and 'dżob' for job. But it's still unmistakably Polish. Luna: So the language didn't just survive — it thrived. Lucas: It did. And I think that's because for Poles, language was never just a tool for communication. It was a declaration: we are still here. We still exist. And no matter what anyone does, we will keep speaking. Luna: That's a powerful legacy. Lucas: It really is. And you know, it's stories like this that make me glad we can keep doing these deep dives. And I'll be honest — the reason we can is that a small group of listeners supports us through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No ads, no sponsors, just people who want to see this kind of history told. Luna: Yeah, it's a pretty special community. And it means we can explore topics like this without any outside pressure. Lucas: Exactly. So, thinking about that — I want to come back to something I mentioned earlier: the role of the Great Emigration in keeping Polish literature alive. That exile community produced not just Mickiewicz, but also Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, and others. They wrote in Polish, but they were living in Paris, in London, in Istanbul. Their work was smuggled back into Poland and read in secret. Luna: So even outside the country, the language was a lifeline. Lucas: Yes. And that tradition of exile literature continued into the 20th century. After the communist takeover, writers like Czesław Miłosz and Witold Gombrowicz wrote from abroad, and their works were circulated in samizdat — underground publications. Again, the language carried the nation's story. Lucas: I think the lesson is that a language is not just a set of words and grammar rules. It's a repository of memory, of identity, of resistance. And when a people refuse to stop speaking it, they refuse to disappear. Luna: That's a beautiful way to put it. Lucas: Thanks. Next time, we might look at another kind of survival — the survival of Poland's Jews through their language, Yiddish, which also has a fascinating story in these lands. But that's for another episode.