Wymysorys (Wymysiöeryś)

1. Introduction & endangerment status

Wymysorys (native Wymysiöeryś), also called Vilamovian, is a West Germanic language spoken in a single town: Wilamowice (Wymysoü) in southern Poland, near the border of Silesia and Lesser Poland. Most scholars trace it to twelfth- and thirteenth-century Middle High German, carried east by settlers said to have come from Flanders, Friesland and Holland, and then reshaped by eight centuries beside Polish. The result is a Germanic language that a German speaker cannot simply understand.¹

Wymysorys is often called the most endangered Germanic language of all. Fewer than twenty people speak it natively today, almost all elderly — a collapse with a clear cause. After the Second World War the Communist authorities banned the language in 1945; the prohibition lasted into the 1950s, breaking transmission to a whole generation.¹

Its revival is one of the most remarkable in Europe, driven since the early 2000s by a young speaker-activist, Tymoteusz Król, who began recording elders, standardised a spelling system and started teaching children. Scholars at the University of Warsaw's Faculty of 'Artes Liberales' (under the direction of Justyna Olko) made Wymysorys a flagship of their endangered-languages programme, and a community theatre troupe stages plays in the language. Today roughly every third child in Wilamowice studies Wymysorys in extracurricular classes.²⁴

This guide is laid out in the eight CEFR sub-levels below, from spelling and sounds (A1.1) to texts and the revival movement (B2.2), each with a visible heading.

Wymysorys has its own Latin-based orthography, standardised by Tymoteusz Król. It looks unlike German because it borrows spelling habits from Polish: ś, ź, ć, and digraphs for the hushing sounds, alongside Germanic-style vowels with umlauts (ö, ü) and extra letters such as ł, ȧ and å. So the same sound English writes 'sh' may appear as ś, and the name of the language, Wymysiöeryś, ends in that Polish-style ś.³

The sound system is West Germanic at its core — rounded front vowels (ö, ü) as in German, a range of diphthongs, and final-obstruent devoicing — but the consonant inventory has been enriched by Polish, which is why the spelling reaches for Polish letters.

Because Wymysorys is so close to German, an English speaker who knows any German has a head start: many words are recognisable once the spelling is decoded.

Start with greetings, and notice how each one echoes a German phrase — a quick way to anchor them in memory.³

Two everyday exchanges: Wi gejt'? ('How are you?', compare German wie geht's?) and the reply Güt, dank śejn ('Fine, thank you'). To say sorry or excuse me: Fercaj(t).

Introducing yourself uses forms that again rhyme with German. 'My name is …' can be Ych has … or Yh hȧs …; the pronoun 'I' is yh/ych (compare German ich).³

Because the lexicon is small and the community tight-knit, a learner's first phrases are immediately useful: there is no anonymous 'practice' Wymysorys — every sentence you speak is spoken to someone who treasures it.

Wymysorys is a Germanic language and behaves like one syntactically. Like German and Dutch, it is a verb-second (V2) language in main clauses: whatever element opens the sentence, the finite verb comes in the second slot. It has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and definite/indefinite articles, much as German does.

So 'How are you?' Wi gejt'? places the question word first and the verb second, exactly parallel to German wie geht's?. Recognising the V2 skeleton lets you parse most simple sentences once you know the vocabulary.

Nouns carry one of three genders and inflect for case and number. As in German, articles and adjectives agree with the noun, and the case system (nominative, accusative, dative and a reduced genitive) marks grammatical roles. Plurals are formed in several ways — endings and, in some words, vowel change (umlaut) — patterns that will feel familiar to anyone who has studied German, though the specific forms are distinctly Vilamovian.

Centuries of Polish contact also left their mark on the noun phrase, in loanwords and in some patterns of usage; sorting native Germanic structure from Slavic borrowing is part of the fun at this level. The reference grammar by Andrason and Król lays the system out in detail.⁴

The Wymysorys verb conjugates for person and number and distinguishes present and past, building perfect tenses with auxiliaries 'to have' and 'to be' plus a past participle — the familiar Germanic pattern. Like German, it has separable-prefix verbs whose prefix detaches and moves to the end of the clause in main-clause V2 order.

Modal verbs, the imperative for commands, and the subordinate-clause word order (where the finite verb moves to the end) round out the system needed to build and understand complex sentences.

Advanced competence means hearing how Wymysorys differs from German rather than merely mapping onto it. Its vowels and diphthongs have shifted along their own path; its intonation and rhythm were shaped in a Polish-speaking environment; and its everyday vocabulary includes words with no German equivalent. Reading and listening across registers — conversation, song, poetry and the revival theatre's scripts — builds an ear for what makes the language itself.

Because the speaker community is so small, 'standard' Wymysorys is a recent, deliberately codified thing; older recordings of elders may show variation that the modern orthography smooths over. Engaging with that variation is part of advanced study.

At the summit, the language lives in performance and community. The amateur theatre troupe (the 'Ufa fisa' tradition) has staged works in Wymysorys — even an adaptation of Shakespeare — as a public act of revitalisation, and the town's children perform songs and recitations. Reading goals include Florian Biesik's early-twentieth-century Wymysorys poetry and the growing body of new writing and teaching texts.

Continuing study has an unusually clear path: the open-access Grammar of Wymysorys by Alexander Andrason and Tymoteusz Król; the University of Warsaw revitalisation project's materials; and — uniquely — the possibility of learning directly from the small circle of speakers and young 'new speakers' who have brought the language back into the mouths of children.⁴²

Learning resources

• A Grammar of Wymysorys (Andrason & Król, Duke University) — full PDFA2–B2 — the open-access reference grammar
• Useful phrases in Wymysorys (Omniglot)A1 — greetings & courtesy
• Language revitalization in Wilamowice (University of Warsaw)Background — the revival programme
• Wymysorys language (Wikipedia)Reference — history, status, orthography