> your average Pole in the 20th century had to worry whether they can even speak their own language as under Prussian-Russian-Austrian occupation it wasn't allo

> your average Pole in the 20th century had to worry whether they can even speak their own language as under Prussian-Russian-Austrian occupation it wasn't allowed under harsh punishment, you could only learn Polish history and language in hiding This is an incredible overexaggeration. Polish was the language spoken on an everyday basis by the vast majority of Poles during the 19th century. It was the language that would ordinarily be used in the marketplace or shop or when talking with one’s Roman Catholic priest and fellow parishioners. It was the language that laborers spoke to each other all day every day at work. Yes, Polish was not a prestige language; official usage and the intelligentsia functioned in Russian or German. And there was definitely heavy censorship of publications during the Tsarist era which required an underground Polish-language education system to teach Polish nationalist history and Polish as a literary language, but the masses weren’t banned from speaking their native tongue.