Kashubian

Kashubian, also known as Kashubian-Pomeranian or simply Kashubian, is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group. It is spoken by some 40,000 people in the Kashubian-Pomeranian Region of Poland, particularly in the area of the city of Gdańsk in the eastern part of Pomerania. Kashubian is one of the minority languages of Poland. It is classified as a separate language by Ethnologue, and as a regional variant of Polish by the Polish Academy of Sciences. Kashubian is closely related to Polish, but is more conservative in some respects. For example, it has retained the Proto-Slavic second-person pronoun in the accusative case, whereas in Polish this has been replaced by the third-person pronoun. Kashubian is an official regional language in the European Union. In 2005, the European Union's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities included Kashubian on the list of protected minority languages. Kashubian is also one of the languages used in the Kreft-Dąbrowski Atlas of the World's Languages in Contact, which maps the distribution of languages in contact with each other.