Piotr speaking Silesian, English

This video was recorded in Czerwionka-Leszczyny, Poland and features Silesian speaker Piotr Usiek. Silesian was spoken by 60,000 people as of a 2002 census, but its international native speaking population was far larger at around 335,148,868 speakers. Silesian is a West Slavic language within the Indo-European langauge family. Silesian has been greatly influenced by Central German given the historically large number of Silesian Germans living in the region, primarily southern Poland and eastern Czech Reoublic. The German speaking population in Sliesia was either evacuated by the German government at the end of World War II, or deported when Poland annexed Silesia. Unfortunately, the status of Silesian and its various dialects as constituting a language entirely separate from Polish or Czech has been intensely politicized, due to the tug-of-war over Silesian land by the Poles, Czechs, and Germans during the 19th and 20th centuries.