The Szlonzoks and their Language: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian Nationalism

Florence: Istituto Universitario Europeo, 2003. — 52 p.This article analyzes the emergence of the Szlonzokian ethnic group or protonation in the context of the use of language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe. When language was legislated into the statistical measure of nationality in the second half of the nineteenth century, Berlin pressured the Slavophone Catholic peasant-cum-worker population of Upper Silesia to become ‘proper Germans’, this is, German-speaking and Protestant.