Vilamovians Erotic

Vilamovians are the people of one small town. Wilamowice sits in southern Poland between Bielsko-Biała and Oświęcim, on the old seam between Silesia and Lesser Poland, and for more than seven centuries its residents have kept a language, a costume and a sense of themselves that stop at the town boundary. They descend from settlers who arrived in the thirteenth century, when local dukes were repopulating land emptied by the Mongol raids. Where those settlers came from is the argument that defines the group. Town tradition says Flanders, Friesland or Holland, and generations of Vilamovians have insisted that they are not Germans. Linguists place their language, Wymysiöeryś, or Wymysorys, among the East Central German dialects, with layers of Polish and traces that may point farther west. A speaker of standard German cannot follow it.

The town was unusually self-possessed. In 1808 its residents bought themselves out of serfdom, and Vilamovian merchants spent the nineteenth century selling cloth across the Habsburg lands, bringing back the imported fabrics that ended up in the women's costume. Marriage within the town was the norm, which kept the language at home. Florian Biesik, a Vilamovian working in Trieste, wrote a long poem in Wymysorys modeled on Dante and insisted to the end that the language was not German at all. The community is Roman Catholic, and proud of Józef Bilczewski, the Wilamowice-born Archbishop of Lviv, canonized in 2005.

The break came in 1945. During the war the occupiers had classed Vilamovians as Germans and put them on the Volksliste, and the new Polish authorities punished them for it. A local decree banned the language and the costume. Families were put out of their houses, and some residents were sent to labor camps, including in the Soviet Union. The ban eased after 1956, but parents had stopped speaking Wymysorys to their children, and by the end of the century it survived mostly among the old.

What happened next is rare. A local schoolchild, Tymoteusz Król, began recording the elders in the early 2000s, and that work grew into a revival backed by university linguists: a standardized spelling, an international language code in 2007, school lessons, and youth theater staged in Wymysorys, Tolkien included. Native speakers are down to a few dozen at most, but there are young people who can speak it too. Easter Monday still brings Śmiergust, when young men in patchwork costumes and masks roam the town dousing young women with water, and residents are still known by household by-names as readily as by surnames.