Standardization of Polish Proper Names Pronunciation in the Supra-regional GermanLanguage in the View of the Contemporary Speech Competence Research

Abstract

Initiated by structuralists at the beginning of the 20th century, the concepts of  language and methods of its exploration, in their basic assumption, methodology and approach, remain binding to the present day. Cultivated independently, scientific disciplines, such as Linguistics and Speech Competence, have been constituted in Germany thanks to Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of language and the division of areas of scientific interests into linguistique de la langue and linguistique de la parole. Since the time of de Saussure, as part of the latter discipline, different research has been being conduceted, including  'speech' (in its broadest sense) being studied as an act. After more than a hundred years, work on the codification of the standard German pronunciation is still being conducted in the Department of Speech Competence and Phonetics in Halle. The studies in question are based on actual language convention, current technical possibilities as well as the capability to carry out research pursuant to a diverse language corpus and sociophonological methods. As part of this work some studies are also being conducted on the pronuncitaion of proper names that come from different languages and that have currently appeared in public use. The research of English, Russian and Polish names has gained a particular momentum in accordance with the so-called moderate germanization of pronunciation by Hans Krech. This  article presents the concept of the research conducted, emphasizing the pronunciation of Polish proper names.