Authors

Anna Stanisz-Lubowiecka¹;  ¹ University of Reading, UK

Discussion

This paper explores the role of professional linguists as intellectual elites in Polish political culture after 1989, where they have enjoyed an institutionally sanctioned privileged position. The focus is on the case of biennial reports on the state of protection of Polish produced for the Parliament by the Polish Language Council (established in 1996) and required by the Polish Language Act (1999). The Act, first proposed by Polish linguists at the 1st Word Culture Forum conference in Wrocław in 1995, was the first piece of Polish legislation focusing exclusively on language and unique in its purpose to ‘protect’ Polish in all areas of public discourse. Using a combination of quantitative corpus-based approaches, including keyword analysis, word frequencies, collocations, and concordance analyses, and qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis, focused on expressions of ideology in discourse identified by Van Dijk, I aim to trace the discursive patterns in Polish linguists’ assessment of the state of protection of Polish in the corpus of Polish Language Council reports, focusing especially on underlying language ideologies. So far, ten reports have been published, but I am hoping to include in the analysis the latest one for the years 2023–2024, which is currently being finalised, to investigate language ideologies employed by linguists in the period of democratic restoration after the ‘Democratic Opposition’ won the parliamentary election in October 2023. My analysis shows that most of the reports are consistently founded on the cluster of standard, nationalist, and purist language ideologies, framing the Polish language as ‘threatened’ by users’ ‘incorrectness’ and/or influences of other languages, which may have undermined the process of liberal democracy building, even if inadvertently. This is consistent with the Polish Language Act and should be interpreted as a sign of anxieties associated with socio-political transformations taking place in Poland after Poland left the Soviet bloc and joined the ‘West’ in 1989. However, the report for 2016–2017 stands out. It recontextualises the Act through liberal language ideology, representing Polish as ‘threatened’ by the abuses of the Law and Justice party and the public media supporting it. This report was also the one that attracted the most significant media coverage. In this report, drawing on linguistic studies of communist propaganda, Polish linguists aimed to defend Polish democracy in the period of democratic backsliding. The study shows that linguists play an important role in shaping politics by formulating, spreading, or critiquing ideas about language, whose ultimate goal is to legitimise a specific socio-political order.