Polish as a Heritage Language Around the World: Selected Diaspora Communities

Polish as a Heritage Language Around the World provides a timely insight into Polish diaspora communities around the world and their endeavours in heritage language maintenance and education.

This edited collection depicts and analyses the unique challenges associated with the intergenerational transmission of Polish as a language that has not had high visibility and status in the surrounding society. Chapters within the volume examine how these circumstances impact the maintenance of the heritage language and affect the capacity to support biliteracy development among younger generations of speakers.

Offering an overview of key concepts and theoretical issues, practical pedagogical guidance, and field-advancing suggestions for further research, Polish as a Heritage Language Around the World will be of interest to researchers and instructors of Polish around the world, as well as those interested in second-language acquisition and heritage language studies.

Piotr Romanowski holds a PhD and a post-doctoral degree in linguistics. He is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics, the University of Warsaw, Poland. His academic interests sit at the intersection of multilingual education and sociolinguistics. He is chief editor of Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices and the book series Language Learning and Multilingualism. He is the founding member of MultiLingNet. In the academic year 2022/23 he was a Research Fellow at University College London.

Anna Seretny is an applied linguists and Professor at the Polish Faculty, the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. She has an extensive record of research and publications on vocabulary learning in Polish as a foreign and heritage language. Her major academic interests are language learning and teaching, heritage language maintenance and education.