Polish among Polish Community in Prague -Difficulties in Obtaining Information about Choosing the Language of Communication and Possible Solutions
Abstract
This paper presents the Polish community in Prague and focuses on some aspects of use of the Polish language. The study is part of the results of the (research) project The Character of Czech-Polish Language Contact within the Polish Community in Prague (financed by the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic).
From the view of minority language maintenance or loss, the choice of the language of communication with the closest environment is very important. This decision depends on a number of factors and is therefore significant information for language planning and language management.
However, obtaining useful and reliable information about the use of languages by members of any community is very difficult in several aspects. Above all, it is necessary to choose which areas of language use must be taken into consideration; furthermore, a suitable method of data collection has to be chosen.
For these purposes, written or oral surveys are often used in quantitative sociolinguistic research. Another method is observation of a real communication.
Nevertheless, both are connected with numerous disadvantages and are very time-consuming. Thus, for our purposes we used another method - the method of a language tree.
This method represents an economical version of quantitative methods of gathering information about language behaviour in bi- or multi-lingual communities. This way of representing a language situation incites the imagination of speakers efficiently so that the answers are simpler, faster and more reliable.
Despite of the fact that the dominant language in the communication of the older generation as well as between siblings is Polish, it is the majority language that gradually infiltrates the sphere of the immediate family (partners and children). In case of mixed families, the exhaustive dominance of the majority language may indicate a progressive language assimilation of the Polish community in Prague.