For many years Silesian was above all a spoken language, and anyone who wanted to write it down had to decide for themselves how to render on paper sounds that do not exist in Polish orthography. The result is several competing spelling systems. Below we describe them, with dates and the names of their creators.

Where the problem with writing comes from

The intensive development of Silesian dialect writing (folk tales, song collections, stage works, humorous columns in the press) dates from the middle of the 19th century. A truly autonomous literary tradition did not, however, develop in Silesia, and the speech of the local population in the pre-modern era was commonly called Polish. Authors therefore wrote down the dialect in various ways, most often based on Polish or German orthography.

The dispute over whether Silesian is a language or a dialect of Polish is a separate one and is not the subject of this text. For spelling, however, it has practical significance: those who treat Silesian as a variety of Polish usually prefer a notation close to Polish, while those who see it as a separate language more often reach for a system with its own characters. The so-called classical spelling is popular especially among people who do not share the view that Silesian is linguistically independent.

Steuer's alphabet and the first years of the internet

The oldest of the systems discussed is Steuer's alphabet, which Feliks Steuer created in the 1930s for writing texts in the Sułkowice variety. It is distinguished by the letter ů for the so-called slanted o, by marking prelabialisation (that is, a front sound before o at the beginning of a word) with the letter u, and by a way of writing softenings different from Polish: żymja, bjoły, śńyg, ćepać. In the first decade of the 21st century it was proposed as the orthography for the whole Silesian language. It is found, for example, in the Silesian edition of Wikipedia and in publications by Bartłůmjej Wanot from before 2024.

In 2006 the Silesian Phonetic Alphabet was created, based on the principles of Steuer's alphabet. It replaces digraphs with single letters (for example sz with the letter š) and does not contain the letter ł, whose sound can be rendered by u. This alphabet did not gain popularity among Silesian organisations, because it has many characters with a caron and therefore resembles the Czech alphabet.

With the spread of the internet, numerous websites, blogs and forums appeared on which people wrote in Silesian in a variety of graphic forms. Zbigniew Greń called this phenomenon spontaneous standardisation. It was a mosaic of individual amateur initiatives which paved the way for later, more orderly efforts.

2007 to 2010: the code, Wikipedia, the Dictation and the ślabikŏrz

Further dates from this period:

The ślabikŏrz alphabet: how it works

The ślabikŏrz alphabet was developed in 2009 by representatives of the associations Pro Loquela Silesiana, Danga and Przymierze Śląskie in cooperation with the linguist Jolanta Tambor. It took its name from the primer mentioned above. It is one of the most popular ways of writing created specifically for Silesian, widely used in writing associated with the mainstream of the Silesian emancipation movement. In 2022 the first edition appeared of “Zasady pisowni języka śląskiego” (Rules of Silesian spelling) by Henryk Jaroszewicz, which also describes these rules.

The aim is to keep Polish orthographic habits while at the same time rendering the characteristic features of Silesian pronunciation. The digraphs ch, cz, dź, dż, sz and rz therefore remain, and softenings are written as in Polish. The main differences are the absence of the letters ą, ę and ó and a few additional characters. Nasal vowels are written as they have broken down in pronunciation: gymba, rynce, piyńć, dōmb, kōnt.

In the simplified variant, which is obligatory for all users, two letters are added:

The extended variant introduces the additional letters ã, ŏ and õ. It was created so that a word could be read differently depending on pronunciation in a given subregion, especially the Opole one, where nasal vowels and diphthongs occur. The letter ŏ denotes the former slanted a, which in the Katowice, Rybnik and Cieszyn areas is pronounced as o, and in the western varieties as a diphthong: gŏdać, wieczerzŏ, farŏrz.

Some authors introduce their own modifications of the alphabet. Known examples are the spelling of Robert Hellfeier for the variety from the border of Prudnik and Krapkowice Counties, with an additional letter ĕ, and the way of writing Germanisms without orthographic adaptation, promoted by Adam Kubik and Markus Bonczkowitz.

Classical spelling and other proposals

In parallel there is an intuitive notation based solely on the letters of the Polish alphabet, without additional characters, called classical spelling. It is not the result of deliberate codification, so it occurs in many individual variants. It often renders the slanted o with the letter ó (bót, drót), and prelabialisation with the letter ł (łogiyń, łón). It is the informal standard of writing for the Cieszyn variety, whose users rarely use ślabikŏrz orthography. On the Czech side of the border a notation based on the Czech alphabet is also used.

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries many further proposals also appeared, used by a narrow circle of people or even by individual authors. They include, among others:

As can be seen, how to write Silesian is not decided by a single institution. The author chooses a system depending on the variety being written down, on the audience and on their own views on the status of Silesian speech. In practice, printed and online texts therefore appear in several versions at the same time.