Aspekt językowy kształtowania się tożsamości narodowych na Litwie pod koniec XIX i w pierwszej połowie XX wieku
Linguistic aspect of the formation of national identities in Lithuania in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century

Summary/Abstract: The issue of polonisation and the status of the Polish language has been the subject of intenseinterest in Lithuania to this day, not only in a cultural and historical context, but also in a politicalcontext, since Poles constitute the largest national minority there. This article is an attempt to de-scribe the role of the linguistic aspect in the national transformations in Lithuania during the crucialperiod, i.e. the formation of modern national identities at the turn of the 19th century and theiremancipation in the form of the politics of national states of the interwar period. The analysis in-cludes a number of statistics on the presence of Lithuanian and Polish language in public space andtheir place in the context of a political, social and economic situation of Lithuanian territories. Thecreation of national states and the formation of linguistic and national processes from the top downby state administration were commonplace on both sides of the Lithuanian-Polish border. In Polish-Lithuanian relations it was the language that became the main hostage of the conflict and a kind oflitmus paper for defining national identity, thus marginalising other aspects.

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