Overview

Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late-Habsburg Lviv makes the case for a two-pronged approach to past urban multilingualism in East-Central Europe, one that considers both historical and linguistic features. Based on archival materials from late-Habsburg Lemberg – now Lviv – in western Ukraine, the author examines its workings in day-to-day life in the streets, shops and homes of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The places where the city’s Polish-Ukrainian-Yiddish-German encounters took place produced a distinct urban dialect. A variety of south-eastern “borderland” Polish, it was subject to strong ongoing Ukrainian as well as Yiddish and German influence. Jan Fellerer analyzes its main morpho-syntactic features with reference to diverse written and recorded sources of the time. This represents a departure from many other studies that focus on the phonetics and inflectional morphology of Slavic dialects. Fellerer argues that contact-induced linguistic change is contingent on the historical specifics of the contact setting. The close-knit urban community of historical Lviv and its dialect provide a rich interdisciplinary case study.

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9781498580144

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Recently a growing number of interdisciplinary monographs focus on the phenomenon of multilingualism in Central Europe. But Fellerer's study is the first one ever that illustrates and analyzes the actual practices of such polyglotism, as conditioned by the specific power, religious, economic and social relations in Austria-Hungary's eastern metropolis of Lwow. --Tomasz Kamusella, University of St. Andrews -- Tomasz Kamusella, University of St Andrews Seamlessly merging a historic ethnography of multilingual Galician Lviv with a fine-grained and nuanced linguistic analysis of its urban dialect, Fellerer's book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground and sets a new standard for what is possible in historical sociolinguistics. --Aneta Pavlenko, University of Oslo -- Aneta Pavlenko, University of Oslo The appearance of Jan Fellerer's monograph opens a new page in Polish studies, particularly, in its interdisciplinary context. Fellerer has succeeded in painting a fine-grained picture of historical multilingualism in Lviv before WWII and in singling out concrete linguistic characteristics of Lviv, the Polish borderland at that time. This monograph will remain a classic not only in the field of Polish and Slavic sociolinguistics, but also in language-based interdisciplinary studies dealing with multilingual regions in general. --Motoki Nomachi, Hokkaido University -- Motoki Nomachi, Hokkaido University

Recently a growing number of interdisciplinary monographs focus on the phenomenon of multilingualism in Central Europe. But Fellerer's study is the first one ever that illustrates and analyzes the actual practices of such polyglotism, as conditioned by the specific power, religious, economic and social relations in Austria-Hungary's eastern metropolis of Lwow. --Tomasz Kamusella, University of St. Andrews--Tomasz Kamusella, University of St Andrews Seamlessly merging a historic ethnography of multilingual Galician Lviv with a fine-grained and nuanced linguistic analysis of its urban dialect, Fellerer's book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground and sets a new standard for what is possible in historical sociolinguistics. --Aneta Pavlenko, University of Oslo The appearance of Jan Fellerer's monograph opens a new page in Polish studies, particularly, in its interdisciplinary context. Fellerer has succeeded in painting a fine-grained picture of historical multilingualism in Lviv before WWII and in singling out concrete linguistic characteristics of Lviv, the Polish borderland at that time. This monograph will remain a classic not only in the field of Polish and Slavic sociolinguistics, but also in language-based interdisciplinary studies dealing with multilingual regions in general. --Motoki Nomachi, Hokkaido University

Seamlessly merging a historic ethnography of multilingual Galician Lviv with a fine-grained and nuanced linguistic analysis of its urban dialect, Fellerer's book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground and sets a new standard for what is possible in historical sociolinguistics. --Aneta Pavlenko, University of Oslo Recently a growing number of interdisciplinary monographs focus on the phenomenon of multilingualism in Central Europe. But Fellerer's study is the first one ever that illustrates and analyzes the actual practices of such polyglotism, as conditioned by the specific power, religious, economic and social relations in Austria-Hungary's eastern metropolis of Lwow. --Tomasz Kamusella, University of St. Andrews--Tomasz Kamusella, University of St Andrews The appearance of Jan Fellerer's monograph opens a new page in Polish studies, particularly, in its interdisciplinary context. Fellerer has succeeded in painting a fine-grained picture of historical multilingualism in Lviv before WWII and in singling out concrete linguistic characteristics of Lviv, the Polish borderland at that time. This monograph will remain a classic not only in the field of Polish and Slavic sociolinguistics, but also in language-based interdisciplinary studies dealing with multilingual regions in general. --Motoki Nomachi, Hokkaido University

Author Information

Jan Fellerer is assistant professor in non-Russian Slavonic languages at the University of Oxford, Wolfson College.

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