Linguistic Integration in History of Polish Language

Linguistic integration is a set of processes of regiolects, dialects, and slangs, into one language, under influence of social, economical, and political factors that lead to national unification. The process of integration occurs continuously and imperceptibly in the entire history of a language. In the history of Polish, language integration has three particularly important phases: Old-Polish period (10th to 15th centuries), the interwar period (1918–1939), and the second half of the 20th century (1960–1990). In the Middle Ages, integration was aimed at introducing Polish into written record and elevating it to the rank of an ethnic language. During the interwar period, the aim was to solidify the position of standard Polish among regional varieties and to strengthen its codification. In the second half of the 20th century, the aim was to popularize standard Polish in several variants