Jan Fellerer. Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late Habsburg Lviv.

Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. viii, 295 pp. [Studies in Slavic, Baltic, and Eastern European Languages and Cultures.] ISBN 978-1-4985-8014-4.

Abstract

Jan Fellerer is associate professor in non-Russian Slavonic languages at Wolfson College of the University of Oxford. His Urban Multilingualism is a masterful demonstration of how one can conduct a sociolinguistic study without direct access to speakers of the language(s) in question. His portrayal of what he calls “Lviv borderland Polish” (LBP) is based on close reading of two kinds of material: Polish and Ukrainian popular satirical periodicals and perhaps surprisingly, police and court records. His reading is informed by his profound knowledge of Polish and Ukrainian, both their standard versions and geographically relevant dialects.