A Little Wend Trivia

I've been enlightened to another European ethnicity, the Kashubs. They live along the Baltic coast of Poland, particularly in the largish city of Gdynia.

The Kashubs are a Slavic people from northwestern Poland. They still retain their own language, which some regard as a dialect of Polish.

More broadly the Kashubs are part of a Slavic group that lives further west than the Poles, but which speak a similar language from the Lekhitic sub-group of Slavic languages. Collectively these people have been called Wends (particularly in histories of the early middle ages), although the subgroups are the (still existent) Sorbs of Germany, the Kashubs of Poland, their close relatives the until recently identifiable Slovincians of Germany, assimilated Pomeranians of Germany, and the linguistically extinct Polabians from a bit further west in Germany.

I've been fascinated by the linguistic aspects of ethnography since my older brother brought home a college geography text when I was nine.

In this case, I was alerted by the fact that the new leader of Poland, Donald Tusk, is a Kashub.

In this little bit of research I also discovered that one of my favorite authors, Gunter Grass, is a Kashub as well - although his name provides a good example of the Germanization of non-Polish Lekhitic peoples.

P.S. Time to go pester the vX spouse about what she knows about Kashubs. My guess is not much - her family came from Poles who lived predominantly far away south in Austria-Hungary prior to emmigration.

UPDATE: Ethnologue's page on Poland lists Kaszubski as an alternative name for the language of the Kashubs. That brought back memories of a boss I had by that name when I was a janitor at a high school in 1982.

Comments

[Stephen Karlson]

There's an old Milwaukee comedy record featuring "Kaszube Michael" as a principal character. The Jones Island area of Milwaukee, now the port, was home to a large colony of Kaszubes, who, not surprisingly, fished Lake Michigan.