Linguae Europaeae

by Costanza Vallicelli Costanza Vallicelli is a MA student in Italian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the future, Costanza hopes to continue her graduate studies and become a professor, specializing in understudied Romance languages and heritage speakers. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. On Sunday mornings at Bethany Church, also known as Biserica Betania, a Romanian Pentecostal church in the northern suburbs of Chicago, dozens of people, most of them of Romanian origin, gather for the Sunday service. At the entrance of the church, people of all ages greet each other in a mix of English and Romanian. Once the service starts and the entire congregation joins together to celebrate their faith, their language of choice is one, and unified: Romanian. The church leaders conduct sermons in Romanian, the choir sings in Romanian, and members of the congregations pray aloud in Romanian. They might not be aware, b...

By Weronica Dabros Weronica Dabros was a senior majoring in Integrative Biology and minoring in Polish when she wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in spring 2019. She was planning on applying to dental schools to continue her career in health. They have been named the za chlebem (“For Bread”) migrants from a damaged country. They are the land hungry immigrants; the peasants, the censored, the opportunists. They are the low-skilled wage laborers. They are, as far as their origins in this country are concerned, the Polish of Chicago . Chicago 1950 (Source: wikimedia commons ) In the 19th century, Chicago was a growing city with industrial companies that provided many immigrants with greater opportunities to achieve their own ‘American Dream’. With the influx of various immigrants from Eastern Europe in the 1890’s, Chicago lured more Poles than any American city (Radzialowski 1976). Chicago became ‘Poland elsewhere’ beyond the borders of the Republi...

By Jacqueline San Diego Polish Flag ( Image Source Wikimedia Commons ) While Poland might be best known for its beer and many delicious flavors of pierogi, few of us are aware of the strong connection of the Polish people to their state language, Polish, which they call 'polszczyzna'. Tracing back the long and eventful history of Poland, we find evidence that explains this overpowering pride in the language that spreads across borders and seas. Poland has endured a very long journey of hardship in its struggle for independence. Although it seems unimaginable today, Poland did not exist as a sovereign state for over 120 years. Erased from the map of Europe, it was partitioned until 1918 between three Empires: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. Poland’s hard-fought independence was also short-lived after World War I and barely two decades later, the aggression against the Polish state by Nazi Germany in 1939 effectively signaled the beginning of World War II. Fears o...