s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

The status of English lexis in the Polish language 173
drag queen 8 juror 4
drajw or drive 14 juta 11
The answers are striking since they show that there is almost no agreement
on the status of lexical items of English origin. All the respondents agreed that
there are 15 well-assimilated English borrowings (less than 10 percent of the
corpus). If, however, we add those items that were marked as foreign by only
one or two students, the number increases to 26 English loans. The reverse observation
is also worth noting. No item was considered by everybody to have
the status of a foreign word. In very few cases (32 subjects), which means almost
all the respondents, indicated such items. What is even more surprising is
the fact that some anglicisms which are so well-adapted that they are characterized
by Polish flexion, e.g., dryblować, debugować or by Polish derivational
suffixes, e.g., dygitalizacja, dygitalny were recognized as foreign words.
6. Conclusions
It seems that the theoretical discussion concerning the differences between
the discussed terms, which is always needed as it advances sciences, is not related
to the distinctions known at least to some specialists or to well-educated
Polish native speakers.
As mentioned before, this difficulty in distinguishing the two terms: borrowing
and foreignism is reflected in the lexicography. Thus, some lexicographers
write dictionaries of foreign words and some of borrowings and both
types of dictionaries include similar items. This simply implies that the borderline
between a borrowing and a foreignism is fuzzy. Kuźniak (2009: 98–120)
quotes many definitions of the term foreignism (or to be more precise, reasons
for including various items to this category) suggested by different authors of a
number of English dictionaries of foreign words and phrases. Sometimes they
seem to be controversial. This is to say that dictionary writers take into account,
among others, the following factors: an arbitrary or subjective decision to include
an item (!), frequency of occurrence, a graphemic criterion (presence of
italics), unfamiliarity of a unit, some degree of foreign orthography, pronunciation
or flavour, recent adoptions which indicates a diachromic basis (cf.
Kuźniak 2009: 101–120). On the other hand, as Kuźniak notices some authors
use the same criteria in reference to borrowings. This is, for instance, Helen
Boesse’s case (Boesse 1988, quoted after Kuźniak 2009: 121): “The notion of
foreignness is presented as taken for granted, which practically leads to the discussion
of a wide spectrum of qualitatively different units ranging from those
quite well adapted to the English language to others whose presence is rather
incidental”.