Linguistic purism and loanword adaptation techniques: the case of Polish

Abstract

This article reports on a study whose aim was to analyze the relation between the level of declarative purism and the preference for a particular loanword adaptation technique. Evidence from many languages shows that language purists accept foreign words more readily if they are in a native disguise; as a consequence, they choose adaptation techniques which mask the origin of foreign words. An online survey (N = 213) making use of invented loanwords showed that educated Poles who declare a high level of purism are, in comparison with those who do not care about the purity of their language, less tolerant of unadapted loanwords and more apt to accept their native synonyms, newly coined for that purpose. In addition, assuming that loanword adaptation techniques are ordered with respect to how well they mask the foreign origin of a word, respondents who prefer a certain adaptation technique opt for techniques which are close in the assumed order but dislike distant techniques. The survey also showed that the aversion to loanwords increases with the respondents’ age and decreases with their English language competence.

Keywords:

• Xenophobic purism
• invented loanwords
• loanword adaptation
• quantitative analysis
• language awareness
• attitudes to language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/k5uye/ and https://osf.io/k5uye/. To obtain the author’s disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Notes

1 When bryftrygier entered Polish, Poland was partitioned among Prussia, Russia and the Habsburg Empire. Russian and German were perceived as tools of political oppression, aimed at depriving Poles of their national identity, and borrowings from these languages were considered undesirable. Under these circumstances, bryfrtygier dropped out of use when Poland regained independence in 1918, while listonosz, still German in structure but not in its morphemic substance, is still in use.

2 Pol.: ‘podkreślić wszystko, co wydaje się Państwu niefortunnie sformułowane’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mirosław Bańko

Mirosław Bańko is Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. He has been dealing with lexicography, lexical semantics, language contact, iconicity in language, as well as Polish grammar and normative linguistics. Between 1991 and 2010 he was responsible for the Polish Dictionaries Department at PWN Polish Scientific Publishers. From 2012 to 2020 he was Head of the Institute of Polish Language, University of Warsaw. His latest research concerns, inter alia, jocular dictionaries, such as The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce and Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary of Received Ideas) by Gustave Flaubert.

Alicja Witalisz

Alicja Witalisz is Professor of English Linguistics at the Institute of English Studies at the Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland. Her field of research is language contact and linguistic borrowing, covert loans in particular. She has published extensively on lexical, morphological, structural and semantic borrowing from English. She is a member of several Polish and international academic associations and serves as journal reviewer and advisory board member. She lectures on English linguistics and runs English-Polish language contact seminars.

Karolina Hansen

Karolina Hansen is Associate Professor at the Center of Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests are in the fields of social psychology and sociolinguistics, and include topics such as language and accent attitudes, linguistic purism, gender-fair language, and discourse around immigration-related topics.