Texan Silesian



Texan Silesian is a dialect of the Silesian language used by descendants of immigrant Silesians in American settlements from 1852 to the present. The speakers of the dialect came to America from the area of Płużnica Wielka, Strzelce Opolskie and Toszek in Opolian Silesia. The dialect evolved around the area of the unincorporated community of Panna Maria in Karnes County, Texas which is considered by the Texas State Historical Association "the oldest permanent Polish settlement in America and as the home of the nation's oldest Polish church and school." Another significant settlement in which Texan Silesian is present is neighboring Cestohowa.

Texan Silesian is substantially less influenced by German because its speakers emigrated before the Kulturkampf, a government campaign of Germanization enacted by the German Empire, which added many Germanisms to the Silesian dialect within said country's pre-1914 state borders. The language is kept alive by its current speakers, but they know it only in its spoken form. Texan Silesian has not been replaced by English as a spoken language by the older generations of the Panna Maria area, because the local Silesian Polish community was historically strongly isolated. Nevertheless, Texan Silesian has adopted some words from English.

One of the characteristic features of Texan Silesian phonetics is called mazuration, a widespread linguistic process within the Polish language, especially extant in rular areas, in which postalveolar fricatives and affricates (Polish cz, sz, ż, dż) are pronounced, whereas in the Silesian dialect of the Katowice urban area they are pronounced. Mazuration was already present in Texan Silesian. Another phonetic peculiarity of the dialect is its more recent denasalization. For example, the nasal vowel, still common in modern Polish and present in Texan Silesian of the 19th century, became the oral vowel or diphone , differing from most other Silesian dialects, in which denasalization of  produced the diphone. This might suggest that Texan Silesian split from other Silesian dialects before the denasalization process began. A visible product of these language changes is the name of the settlement of Cestohowa. Its name is derived from Częstochowa, a city of large religious importance within Poland, but, due to the phonetic processes mentioned above, cz was written as c, while ę was written as e.