Lukas Mielczarek

Wymysorys is a West-Germanic language spoken in the small town Wilamowice in the south of Poland (near Silesia). It is also known as Vilamovicean and called Wymysiöeryś by its speakers (see Andrason and Król 2016: 7).

Wymysorys is sometimes called the most endangered Germanic language in the world (Andrason and Król 2016: 7). The majority of its speakers belongs to older generations – with the noticable exception of the co-author of “A Grammar of Wymysorys” (Andrason and Król 2016) Tymoteusz Król, who learned Wymysorys from an elderly neighbour of his as a child and is trying to revitalize it by teaching it to young people in Wilamovice (see Król 2014).

Only up to 20 people are proficient in Wymysorys (see Wicherkiewicz et al 2017: 1) with almost all native speakers belonging to the older generations.
Although many scolars see Wymysorys as a dialect or a colonial variety of German, others – especially recently – argue that it should be regarded as a proper language. Recently Wymysorys got its own language code and a Language Academy for Wymysorys was established in Warsaw (see Andrason and Król 2016: 7-8).

The inhabitants of Wilamowice emphasize their own linguistic and cultural uniqueness and dissimilarity from German. They claim that in contrast to other colonial German varieties spoken in the area were always regarded as German dialects while Wymysorys never was (see Strojnowski 2017).

Moreover, the language is claimed to be generally not mutually understandable with Standard German (Andrason and Król 2016: 8). It has unique features in its lexicon, phonology, and morphology not found in Standard German – some of which I came across in my project.