Authors
Anna Stanisz-Lubowiecka1; 1 SSEES, University College London, UK Discussion
In this paper, I will look at the discourse of linguistics about the Polish language in Poland in the period of socio-political transformations (between 1989 and 2015, when the populist right-wing Law and Justice party came to power). In this period, Polish linguists following the prescriptivist tradition were immensely popular, promoting ‘correct’ Polish in popular science books about language, dictionaries, newspaper columns, press articles, hosting radio programmes, TV shows, and recently social media platforms. I will argue that three language ideologies are dominant in their discourse: standard, purist, and nationalist, which promote the linguistic norms of ‘correctness’, ‘neutrality’, ‘elegance’, and ‘purity’. This shows a change from the period of communist authoritarianism, when standard language ideology was promoted by linguists in state media, but it was much less comprehensive and elaborate than after 1989, and it was accompanied by liberal language ideology promoting the norm ‘neutrality’, which underlied linguistic studies of communist propaganda published in the oppositional press. I will look at conference papers presented at the First Word Culture Forum conference in Wrocław in 1995. After the conference, which was co-organised with Polish state institutions, the participants applied to the Polish Academy of Sciences to appoint the Polish Language Council and to the Minister of Culture and Art to begin work on legislation on the Polish language, which in turn eventually led to the introduction of the Polish Language Act in 1999. Using thematic analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, I will argue that Polish discourse of linguistics can ultimately be interpreted as a strategy of construction of a specific version of national identity, which provided a discursive opportunity structure for the discourse of the Law and Justice party, even if inadvertently. After the party came to power, Polish linguists again promote liberal language ideology, which was absent in their discourse in the previous period. 
