Gender and English borrowings in the Polish media
Urszula Okulska
Warsaw University
Massive international and intercultural communication accompanied by rapid globalization processes of political, economic, and social nature have brought changes in interactive styles of European languages resulting from their growing exposure to English. From among a myriad of institutional discourse types, the language of the Polish media, due to its contact with English, seems to be undergoing an intense transformation, whose most direct exponent are changes within its micro-structures and formal properties. The aim of this study is to explore the degree of the interventionism of English into Polish topic and political interviews. A large corpus of interviews from two leading Polish radio channels has been investigated with an aim to trace the process of the absorption of English lexical, semantic, syntactic, and discursive structures by Polish. The paper will address the problem of the gender factor and its correlations with the direction of language change in the Polish media under the influence of English. The particular transformations will be classified according to changes ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ to test the tendencies that male and female informants exhibit in the advancement of the two types of shifts in the Polish context. The alterations will be presented from synchronic and diachronic viewpoints via qualitative and quantitative analyses.