The major goals of the project include:

• preparing a set of materials needed in university teaching of the following subjects: history of the Polish language, relationships between Polish and other languages, and methodology of diachronic linguistics, as well as other subjects related to the history of language taught as part of philological programmes;
• popularising the knowledge of Polish grammar books against European linguistic theories, of the authors of the grammar books and the times when they were written;
• popularising the knowledge of the history of Polish linguistics;  
• systematising the knowledge of the history of Polish grammar books, with a broad historical and cultural background taken into consideration;
• introducing the prefaces added to the grammar books, which not only are the respective author’s comment to the grammar book but also tell a lot about the author, atmosphere of the epoch and reasons for writing the study.

There are very few grammar books available online, and their current reprints are also difficult to acquire, sometimes due to their prices, like in the case of the 1980 Cologne edition of Polonicae grammatices institutio (Lecture on Polish grammar) by Piotr Stojeński, and at times because of a short print run, like e.g. the reprint of Jeremias Roter’s grammar book of 1616 released in 150 copies in the Silesian Library in 1998. The information about most of the grammar books is distributed and many of them are known of only by titles.

The description of the grammar books will permit the presentation of:

• changes in the description of the grammatical system of Polish (morphological categories, terminology);
• the dependence of the grammatical description on foreign models; the influence of the European linguistic thought on the grammatical description of Polish;
• innovativeness and conservatism of the descriptions, including mutual relations between the grammar books and the degree of their originality;
• changes in the language itself (such as language development stages, regional variations);
• functional efficiency of the Polish language in handling various fields of life.

Familiarity with the works of predecessors will not only permit a presentation of the evolution of grammarians’ views and a better use of their output but it will also rescue their ideas from oblivion. At the same time, it will decrease the dangerous trend, which is present also in the contemporary Polish linguistics, of discovering what has already been discovered or realised by forerunners.

The compendium, which is available to the general public, can be extensively used by both students of philological programmes, linguists, literary scholars, culture experts, and non-specialists who are interested in the history of Polish. Hopefully, it will contribute to arousing interest in the Old Polish language and old grammar books and, as a teaching aid, it will allow self-monitoring and self-examination of the learning process as well as systematisation of the knowledge of the history of linguistics. Last but not least, in the context of cultural relationships between Poland and the West, it will familiarise the website visitors with the contribution of foreigners (the authors of the earliest grammar books) to Polish science and culture and demonstrate the European sources of theoretical inspirations for the authors of the grammar books. The old grammar books were published both within the territory of the Commonwealth (Cracow, Vilnius) and outside it (Breslau, Oels, Riga, Königsberg). The Middle Polish grammar books were initially written in Latin and later - in modern languages, chiefly German. The first grammar book in Polish, written by Walenty Szylarski, was not published until 1770, while an Italian grammar book written in Polish was released nearly one hundred years earlier (in 1675).    

We do hope that the website will succeed in fulfilling its educational function and contribute to popularising the knowledge of both old grammar books and their social role, in particular on the borderlines between languages, and the Polish language of the past epochs, the theoretical standard and linguistic authorities of those days. It will also enable various faces of the world hidden behind words to be revealed. The overview of the grammar books is supplemented with the relevant literature added to the individual studies.