| Lasowice Wielkie / Groß Lassowitz | |
|---|---|
| Village | |
Wooden church | |
  Lasowice Wielkie / Groß Lassowitz | |
| Coordinates: 50°52′12″N18°13′33″E / 50.87000°N 18.22583°E | |
| Country |  |
| Voivodeship | Opole |
| County | Kluczbork |
| Gmina | Lasowice Wielkie |
| Population | 764 |
Lasowice Wielkie [lasɔˈvit͡sɛ ˈvjɛlkʲɛ] / German : Groß Lassowitz, (1936-45: Oberwalden) is a village in Kluczbork County, Opole Voivodeship, in south-western Poland. It is the seat of the gmina (administrative district) called Gmina Lasowice Wielkie. [1] It lies approximately 13 kilometres (8 mi) south of Kluczbork and 31 km (19 mi) north-east of the regional capital Opole.
German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol (Italy), the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and Liechtenstein. It is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg and a co-official language in the Opole Voivodeship in Poland. The languages which are most similar to German are the other members of the West Germanic language branch: Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, Low German/Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Yiddish. There are also strong similarities in vocabulary with Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, although those belong to the North Germanic group. German is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English.
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town, with a population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. Though villages are often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighborhoods. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape, as a dispersed settlement.
Kluczbork County is a unit of territorial administration and local government (powiat) in Opole Voivodeship, south-western Poland. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998. Its administrative seat and largest town is Kluczbork, which lies 41 kilometres (25 mi) north-east of the regional capital Opole. The county also contains the towns of Wołczyn, lying 12 km (7 mi) west of Kluczbork, and Byczyna, 15 km (9 mi) north of Kluczbork.
In the Upper Silesia plebiscite of 20 March 1921 394 inhabitants (84,2%) voted to remain in Germany, 74 for Poland. Thus Groß Lassowitz remained part of the Weimar Republic. [2]
The Upper Silesia plebiscite was a plebiscite mandated by the Versailles Treaty and carried out on 20 March 1921 to determine a section of the border between Weimar Germany and Poland. The region was ethnically mixed with both Germans and Poles; according to prewar statistics, ethnic Poles formed 60 percent of the population. Under the previous rule by the German Empire, Poles claimed they had faced discrimination, making them effectively second class citizens. The period of the plebiscite campaign and inter-Allied occupation was marked by violence. There were three Polish uprisings, and German volunteer paramilitary units came to the region as well.
The Weimar Republic is an unofficial historical designation for the German state from 1918 to 1933. The name derives from the city of Weimar, where its constitutional assembly first took place. The official name of the republic remained Deutsches Reich unchanged from 1871, because of the German tradition of substates. Although commonly translated as "German Empire", the word Reich here better translates as "realm", in that the term does not have monarchical connotations in itself. The Reich was changed from a constitutional monarchy into a republic. In English, the country was usually known simply as Germany.
The village has a population of 764. There is an old wooden church in Lasowice Wielkie from the 16th century. The village is officially bilingual as the majority of its population are Germans. Bilingual signs were installed recently.
The registered German minority in Poland at the 2011 national census consisted of 148,000 people, of whom 64,000 declared both German and Polish ethnicities and 45,000 solely German ethnicity. At a 2002 census there were 152,900 people declaring German ethnicity. Representatives of the German ethnic minority presume that the figures for their group are somewhat higher because after their exclusion in the communist period, members of the minority prefer not to state their real ethnicity. Also, due to complications arising from multi-ethnic Polish/German identities, many people of partial German descent do not identify with their German background, and some estimates number Poles with varying degrees of German ancestry from 400,000 to 500,000.
