Women’s Polish Language – Historical Prolegomena (The Nineteenth Century and the Mid-Twentieth Century)

Abstract

The author analyses memoirs of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Three of them were written by women (Zamoyska, Lubomirska, and Nałkowska) and three were written by men (Łoś, Sczaniecki, and Piłsudski). The text seeks to verify the hypothesis expressed in the earlier works of the author (Women’s Polish Language – Historical Prolegomena, 1994), namely that the contribution of French borrowings was greater in women’s language. The memoirs under study confirm this hypothesis. They contain on the average four times more gallicisms (asides from French, rare and individual borrowings) than men’s memoirs of that period.