A Diachronic Study of Czech-Polish Language Contact: Focused on the Reception of Czech Language in Poland

Czech shows many significant sociolinguistic phenomena in the field of language contact between German, Slovak and Polish respectively, which are geographically neighboring languages. The motives, conditions and cause and effect for the contact between each language can be various and have different linguistic meanings. Historically, Czech has exhibited sociolinguistic aspects such as language conflict and linguistic purism regarding German in contact and bilingual questions with Slovak. In respect with Polish in contact, however Czech had been played an important role in the development of Polish literary language, especially in the 16th century. The history of close contact between two languages started from the Christianization of Poland through the Czech-Polish alliance and the specific historico-geographic factors of High Silesia. Moreover the linguistic similarity of the two languages as the West Slavonic had been catalyzed Czech-Polish language contact. In this context, this paper discusses the various sociolinguistic factors which serve to reception of Czech language in Poland and examines the examples of lexical borrowings and some linguistic changes influenced by Czech.