This volume addresses the question of 'identity' in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of 'sub-cultures' over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as 'ethnic group', 'majority' or 'minority'. Instead, a 'sub-culture' is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.

This volume addresses the question of 'identity' in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of 'sub-cultures' over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as 'ethnic group', 'majority' or 'minority'. Instead, a 'sub-culture' is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.

Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late-Habsburg Lviv makes the case for a two-pronged approach to past urban multilingualism in East-Central Europe, one that considers both historical and linguistic features. Based on archival materials from late-Habsburg Lemberg - now Lviv - in western Ukraine, the author examines its workings in day-to-day life in the streets, shops and homes of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The places where the city's Polish-Ukrainian-Yiddish-German encounters took place produced a distinct urban dialect. A variety of south-eastern "borderland" Polish, it was subject to strong ongoing Ukrainian as well as Yiddish and German influence. Jan Fellerer analyzes its main morpho-syntactic features with reference to diverse written and recorded sources of the time. This represents a departure from many other studies that focus on the phonetics and inflectional morphology of Slavic dialects. Fellerer argues that contact-induced linguistic change is contingent on the historical specifics of the contact setting. The close-knit urban community of historical Lviv and its dialect provide a rich interdisciplinary case study.

In the 20th century, both Lviv and Wroclaw went through cataclysmic changes. Assertively Polish pre-war Lwow became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn 'recovered' by communist Poland as Wroclaw. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwow's demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wroclaw and most Jews perished or went into exile. Migration entailed new myths and the construction of official memory projects. The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and 'bottom-up' historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin, loss on the one hand, gain on the other, in two cities that are complementary.