Die Bedeutung der sprachhistorischen Forschungen in Polen

The paper emphasises the importance of research on the history of German used on the territory of Poland. The studies on the history of the German language and dialects based on texts from Polish urban archives were the focus of Germanic studies in Poland during the pre-World War II period. After the war, such research continued until the late 1960s but was interrupted later. Currently Polish language historians concentrate on the study of early Modern High German text sources from Polish urban archives and the examination of their graphemic, phonetic, syntactic, lexical features and text typology. Also examined are endangered dialects spoken on the territory of Poland.