Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late-Habsburg Lviv [Hardcover]

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 Lembergnow Lviv in western Ukrainethe 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 citys 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 approach 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.Jan Fellerer is associate professor in non-Russian Slavonic languages at the University of Oxford, Wolfson College.

Recently a growing number of interdisciplinary monographs focus on the phenomenon of multilingualism in Central Europe. But Fellerers study is the first one ever that illustrates and analyzes the actual practices of such multilingualism, as conditioned by the specific power, religious, economic, and social relations in Austria-Hungarys eastern metropolis of Lviv. 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, Fellerers book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground and sets a new standard for lSº