Lowland Scots

[Kathleen E. Miller]

At 10:20 AM 3/7/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Is there a lowland dialect of Polish?  I'm not sure because much of what is
>now Polish coastline was once East Prussia.  However, according to a college
>professor of mine who came from Gdansk, circa World War I there were a lot of
>Poles in Gdansk, and they could have been there for a long time before that.


Gdansk, in the Pomorze region of Poland, was Polish from 966 until 1772
when it was seized, stolen, usurped - take your pick [I'm a little biased]-
by the Prussians. And it remained Prussia/Germany until March of 1945.

The Poles there do speak a slightly different dialect than that of, say,
the people from Slask (I mean here specifically upper Silesia), Kaszuby, or
Mazuria. In fact upper Silesian, spoken in a part that was also part of
Prussia for most of 2 centuries, seems to have more of a German influence
to me than what I heard in Gdansk.

But I am not knowledgeable enough about language classification to say
whether what they speak in Pomorze is "lowland" or not.


Kathleen E. Miller
Research Assistant to William Safire
The New York Times