Losing a language : what it means and what it does to speakers : Lemko’s expelled from their own tongue

In my text I show - in the form of illustrational material - selected examples of emotional stance and thoughts of members of the Łemko community regarding the current state of the Łemko language. This state is seen as unproper, dangerous, unsettled, sad, tragic. Those thoughts and emotional stances are a reflecation of the ways in which people who experience dislocating, discriminating, discultural trauma rationalise their identity. The examples provided have been garthered in the course of field research conducted from April to November 2017 in the three main areas of current Łemko settlement: “obczyzna” [foreign land] i.e. the formerly German lands in Poland that around 35% of Łemkos were resettled to in 1947, Łemkowyna i.e. the ethnically Łemko territory, located mostly in Low Beskids, that around 10% from the Łemko that had been resettled in 1947 came back to and Western Ukraine where the majority of the Łemkos who had been resettled “to Russia” in the years 1945-46 (around 65% of the population in those days) lives nowadays. The interviews have been enriched by observations done in the previous years and talks showcasing Łeko language attitudes. The statements have been obtained from people aged 20-95, both women and men. The education of the respondents ranges from primary school to university level and they live both in rural and urban settings. The presentation of the material will be preceded by a short information on the sociolinguistic status of the Łemko language. Thereafter I will problematise the areas of disorders of language identity and the diagnoses of those disorders by members of the Łemko community in the form of general conclusions from the statements obtained during the interviews. The causes of language endangerement are seen by many as stemming from a disfunction of the natural intergenerational transmission. This is connected to the inheritance of fear of discrimination, ridicule, exclusion, the feeling of low prestige of the Łemko language and its lack of usefulness in social advancement, shame due to being different and having a primitve culture, laziness and meanness of character and the consequence of all the above: a conviction that it forms an unneeded burden, one that should not be passed on to children. This sphere of disorder is set against a well functioning and ever developing sphere of revitalisation activities: the teaching of Łemko language, its popularisation by organisations and artistic ensembles, through media and literature – this is connected to a growth of ethnic consciousness among the Łemkos and it pushes the perspective of language death of Łemko further away in time. After the general comments, I present a description of one, three-generational Łemko family showcasing the different language attitudes of its members. The whole presentation is closed by a few examples of different language attitudes that serve as an illustration to the complexity of the linguistic situation of a minority language, endangered in its development by a whole set of factors: sociological but also political and discriminational. The final conclusions are a summary and a synthesis of the formerly presented statements