Język lagrów a język łagrów. Badania; założenia badawcze

Abstract

The article focuses on two language varieties which originated at the time when the 20th century came to a sudden moral and civilisation regress and two totalitarian regimes confined Poles, the people from a democratic, civilised and European country, in concentration camps. The camp reality constituted a different world, in which the language was also different. The author has many-years-experience in studying the so-called lagerszpracha (the language of Nazi prisoners in concentration camps), and she presents the actual research done on the subject emphasising the need for extensive research, barely initiated so far, into the language of Poles in the Soviet lagers. A prospective researcher is warned of superficial analogies resulting from the similarities between any totalitarian regimes and is informed about substantial differences caused by political and strictly linguistic factors between the two unprecedented varieties. According to the author’s suggestion, the language of łagers should be studied not only with a view on Russian borrowing, but also from the grammatical and stylistic perspective taking into consideration the context in which prisoners of the 20th-century hell gave their testimonial, namely Auschwitz and Kołyma.