Kashubian language
West Slavic language spoken in Poland
Kashubian () or Cassubian (; endonym: kaszëbsczi jãzëk; Polish: język kaszubski) is a West Slavic language belonging to the Lechitic subgroup.
Approximately 87,600 people use mainly Kashubian at home. It is the only remnant of the Pomeranian language. It is close to standard Polish with influence from Low German and the extinct Polabian (West Slavic) and Old Prussian (West Baltic) languages.
The Kashubian language exists in two different forms: vernacular dialects used in rural areas, and literary variants used in education.
Origin
Kashubian is assumed to have evolved from the language spoken by some tribes of Pomeranians called Kashubians, in the region of Pomerania, on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea between the Vistula and Oder rivers. It first began to evolve separately in the period from the 13th to the 15th century as the Polish-Pomeranian linguistic area began to divide based around important linguistic developments centred in the western (Kashubian) part of the area.
In the 19th century Florian Ceynowa became Kashubian's first known activist. He undertook tremendous efforts to awaken Kashubian self-identity through the establishment of Kashubian language, customs, and traditions. He felt strongly that Poles were born brothers and that Kashubia was a separate nation.
“Kashubian language” enters the record as west Slavic language spoken in Poland. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kashubian, language and West can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33690. The Library of Congress control number is sh85071708. Authority coordinates are 54.183, 18.000. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kashubian language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.