Polish-American mutilation of the Polish language

agreed! when i was a boy my babcia was always saying stuff like: chocmy do storu; stalismy na kornerze; jehalismy karem/autem.

Actually auto is used in Polish.

This might be about Lwów :) I think the most popular pre war song from there is "Tylko we Lwowie".

edit: I will try to search some information about this dialect from Warsaw.


Doesn't "sklep" mean "cellar" in Czech language?

ok- so you are a minority because the rest of U.S thinks otherwise.
It is Canada that is the cultural mosaic where you are encouraged to keep your cultural identity, U.S. is the melting pot.

and Joanna Krupas Polish is disgusting.

I could care less what rest of America thinks, and who said rest of America shares your view? Guesswho is this you again switching usernames it sure sounds like you.

no, different person.

my point is the majority of america thinks that if you immigrate to u.s. then you must assimilate. I am not American- proud to be from a country where multiculturalism is accepted.

I live in the Orange County Southern Californian part of America and no one here forces assimilation on anyone, nor does a 'majority' think all people should assimilate. We have "Little Saigon", "Little Baghdad", "Little Samoa", etc. here and no one complains. We don't have any prominent Polish neighborhoods around here, but there is a Russan one in Los Alamitos near the horsetrack. I daresay this part of America is as multi-cultural as anywhere on Earth and it works out fine. Don't forget that the USA has no official language. There may be some advocates of assimilation elsewhere in America but I doubt they are a majority. If they were a majority, that cared so much about assimilation, don't you think Engish would be our official tongue by now?

True as I've stated above it's everyone's right to maintain their identity and have their own neighborhoods. If someone wants to live among his people and speak a different language it's their choice. And yes America has no official language this isn't England so it can't be. It's rather whichever language the people speak, now it happens to be English might be Spanish some day.

my uncle told me the same thing..

* puts head down in shame*

I only wish my parents would have sent me to some type of school that taught this.

I dont know their reasons.. I guess I never will both are gone and all thats left
are the few words my father said to me.

* Im gonna kick your dupa if you dont clean your room!! LOL

ahh well. if I ever get to come there I hope my cousins wont laugh to much :)

I don't know if this is national legend or what, but I heard years ago that at one time it wasn't decided whether the official language of the US should be English or German. The Pennsylvania faction was very influential back then and was pushing German.

rybnik
I only herard it as a feminine kara. Incidentally, the word bar (pub) in Michigan was also feminine: bara. There were regional differences. In Michigan a stodoła or obora was a barna, but in Wisconsin it was palatalised - barnia, hence w barnie ~ w barni. And in the PA coalfields there was a saying: skifowało się (there's been a cave-in).

The Muhlenberg legend, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhlenberg_legend

But this is interesting:

in response to the OP, why single out Polish-Americans? Polish people living in Poland mutilate the language plenty, in their own country. I'm not talking about bad grammar either, I'm talking about words that are so silly it makes your cheeks rosey with embarrassment.

oh, i almost forgot....delph has a never ending vendetta with Pol-Ams.

ok, as you were. but honestly man, for what it's worth, Poles in Poland are pretty damn bad as well and the fact that it is happening IN poland might make it even worse.

What are those words?

As for the mutulation to words my grandparents cameover to America and mixed English with Polish. They had their own slang for words. And I think it also has to do with the times changing too. Back in the day there was no internet or comuters. My grandparents use a diriveret of the words. Like email for example they call it electronic lista.. Same thing as Americans have thru out the United State. People in New York speak differently than they do in the south. It makes us unique with the different variations.. It makes who we are.

It's essentially the same with practically any language spoken by the poorest class of immigrants. While not able to understand much slang or dialect Polish at all, I can speak with complete authority about German, and the way the average German-American "mutilates" (often) his grandparents mother tongue is enough to uncurl one's hair! Typically enough, when people from farming families came over to the States, the old folks couldn't read or write, in their own language, much less in English! The result of which was that their children heard such broken German, that it influenced their absorption of the language as adults, if they even managed to at all. When teaching college German (as well as as a college student myself), I found the worst students were often those of German heritage whose grandparents usually spoke only in dialect, and never learned standard German.

I figure the situation's much the same for Polish.