A Language that Forgot Itself
Publisher: ECMI Volume: 10 pages, pdf Description: The mystery persists. In the entry devoted to Poland in the respectable reference on the languages of the world, the Ethnologue, the number of native speakers of German living in the country is conservatively estimated at half a million.1 Until well into the 1990s German sources spoke of one million or a million and a half Germans in Poland. It is noted that the region where they live in compact areas of settlement is the countryside of Upper Silesia. But in the region the local Germans overwhelmingly communicate in the Silesian language.