Authors

Discussion

This paper explores the history of the Polish Language Act and its entanglements with democratic disruptions. Introduced in 1999 at the initiative of Polish linguists, who proposed it at the 1^st Word Culture Forum conference devoted to the current situation of the Polish language in Wrocław in 1995, the Act has been amended 14 times and continues to trigger major controversies at universities, in the media, and in political discourse. It was the first piece of legislation devoted solely to the Polish language since the Decree of 30 November 1945 and unique in its ambition to affect all areas of public discourse in an attempt to ‘protect’ Polish. Using thematic analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (especially Discourse Historical Approach), I will study the content of the Act, key academic papers that led to its introduction, as well as biennial reports on the state of protection of the Polish language submitted to the Sejm and Senate by the Polish Language Council as a consequence of the Act. I will ask: What language ideologies underpin these sources and why are they salient? I will demonstrate that three language ideologies can be detected in the Act, academic texts advocating for its introduction, and the majority of Polish Language Council reports: standard, purist, and nationalist, which promote the linguistic norms of ‘correctness’, ‘purity’, and ‘nativism’, respectively. I will interpret these sources as discourse aimed at the construction of a specific version of national identity in response to anxieties triggered by the changes associated with democratisation, leaving the Soviet bloc, and joining the ‘West’. The Act can thus be seen as an example of discourse undermining the consolidation of the new Polish democracy, providing a discursive opportunity structure for the discourse of the Law and Justice party, even if inadvertently. However, after the party came to power in 2015, the Act was brought up by liberally oriented linguists to criticise the hijacking of democratic language by Law and Justice politicians. The Act thus paradoxically came to serve the opposite purposes of strengthening Polish democracy in the period of democratic backsliding. My analysis of the Polish Language Act shows the importance of metalinguistic discourse in strengthening and undermining democratic systems.