The project Język polski w prasie i innych źródłach pisanych w początkach sowietyzacji Ukrainy (lata 20. i 30. XX wieku) [The Polish Language in the Press and Other Written Sources During the Beginnings of the Sovietization Process in Ukraine (the 1920s and 1930s)] is financed within the framework of the Minister of Science and Higher Education's programme entitled "The National Programme for the Development of the Humanities" between 2012 and 2016. The project is being executed by the Division of the Polish Language of the Eastern Borderlands at the Institute of the Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
This project constitutes the beginnings of systematic research into written Polish texts in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. The main research subject is 'the Soviet Polish language' as 'the new Polish language', used as a tool for the Sovietization of the Polish minority in the USRR.
The sources include:
– press material amounting to a few dozen titles, diversified in terms of their scope, addressees and subject matter; aside from general Republic press titles there are rare local journals, leaflets, newspapers in the form of posters;
– Polish-language official documentation: administrative documents from Polish rural councils, reports, protocols, announcements, manifestos, certifications, resolutions;
– schoolbooks, books, translations of proletarian literature, including primers for learning Polish, illustrating the ways in which the Sovietization process of young school children was conducted;
– handwritten archival documents, letters to newspaper editors, and others.
The linguistic research is concentrated on the following issues:
– the process of how the characteristic features of the 'Soviet Polish language', i.e. the Polish version of the Soviet language used for political propaganda (various terms referring to George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' are used to designate this language, such as EN. Newspeak, PL. nowomowa, RU. новояз, as well as others, e.g. FR. langue de bois, PL. drewniany język, RU. язык Совдепии) came into being and were shaped;
– the links between the researched written versions of the Polish language and the historically shaped regional variant of Polish – the Polish language of the eastern borderlands.