Culture on a plate | Joanna Gronkowska

The study aims to show how the culinary identity of migrants is expressed through linguistic and cultural elements in bilingual representatives of the second generation.

On the left, you can see the map of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin in northern France. On the right, the map of the Dolny Śląsk in Poland, the destination region for Migrants.

The migration of Polish miners and their families to France, especially to the northern coal basin, began in 1909 and continued until their repatriation after World War II. Part of this heterogeneous group settled in Dolny Slask, mainly for professional reasons. Today, the last witnesses to these events are the second generation of migrants. They have a huge impact not only on the customs and traditions that the re-emigrants still uphold, but also on the language they use, which has retained some dialectal elements, for example from Westphalia, where the first group that emigrated to France came from.

This project was presented during the conference Contextes sociolinguistiques et socioculturels en linguistique appliquée [Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Contexts in Applied Linguistics], Jagiellonian University, Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (November 4-5, 2024; on the left). The poster with results and intepretation of the data collected so far is going to be presented during the conference in Strasbourg (June 12-13, 2025).

Because of the complexity of this research problem, I plan to continue to collect the data and analyse it in 2025 and 2026. If you are interested in cooperation (and you are a sociologist or a historian!), you can write me.