Domain-specific loans mirror historical and cultural changes in specific areas of life and allow to identify the language which at a certain point in time is considered most prestigious by the recipient language users. Foreign loans are always evidence of cultural contacts of the recipient language speech community with other communities, and reflect the sharing of social, economic, political and cultural phenomena among various nations. The article offers a historical overview of Polish domain-specific Anglicisms and presents and analyses over a thousand English loans of four different types in the areas of leisure, fashion and entertainment, which have been enriching Polish since the 17 th century.

Research on anglicisms in Polish has nearly a century-long tradition, yet it was Jacek Fisiak’s 1960s–1980s studies on English loanwords that initiated continuous academic interest in anglicisms, coinciding with more intensive English-Polish language contact in post-war Poland. While English loans have been well-researched in the last four decades, the ongoing intensity of English lexical influence on Polish, yielding not only new loans but also new loan types, calls for further studies, especially in the area of quickly developing professional jargons and sociolects. The influx of English-sourced lexis is reflected in the diversity of semantic fields, whose number has grown from 18 (identified in Słownik warszawski 1900–1927 ) to 45 (Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1995). A semantic field that has been underresearched in studies on Polish anglicisms is the LGBTQ+-related lexis, which has drawn from American English gayspeak, shaped by the post-Stonewall gay rights movement initiated in the 1970s. The language data analysed in this study have been collected in a two-stage procedure, which included manual extraction of anglicisms sourced in a diversified corpus of LGBTQ+-related written texts, published in Polish between 2004 and 2020. The second stage involved oral interviews which served a verification function. The aim of this study is to contribute to the lexicographic attempts at researching English-sourced LGBTQ+-related vocabulary in Polish through its identification, excerption, and classification. Assuming an onomasiological approach to borrowing, we arrange LGBTQ+-related anglicisms on a decreasing foreignness scale to identify the borrowing techniques adopted by the recipient language speakers in the loan nativization process. We also address issues related to the identification and semantics of loans, and sketch areas of research on loan pragmatic functions that need further studies.

While electronic corpora may not seem adequate sources for anglicisms retrieval, since despite promising attempts they still lack readily available and efficient tools for foreign loans identification, they are indispensable in a systematic verification of the use of preidentified loans. The article offers an assessment of an electronic corpus of Polish in reference to its usefulness for the study of English loans. Though we test a selected corpus and its tools, and use Polish anglicisms as exemplifications, the findings presented in the article pertain to other large corpora and anglicisms in other languages. Corpus tools allow for a multidimensional analysis of loans, yet they fail to meet the requirements of more in-depth analyses of anglicisms, related to their semantics and structure. The limitations of corpora tools will be illustrated with authentic attempted-but-failed corpus searches. Keywords anglicism, National Corpus of Polish, English borrowing, loanword adaptation StreszczeniePomimo obiecujących badań automatyczna ekstrakcja anglicyzmów z wykorzystaniem narzędzi dostępnych w elektronicznych korpusach językowych wciąż nie jest możliwa. Mimo to wyszukiwarki korpusowe są nieodzownym narzędziem w systematycznej weryfikacji użycia anglicyzmów wyłuskanych metodą tradycyjną. W artykule omówiono zarówno funkcjonalność, jak i niedoskonałość narzędzi dostępnych w Narodowym Korpusie Języka Polskiego w odniesieniu do badania anglicyzmów różnych typów oraz ich z góry zdefiniowanych cech. Niedostatki narzędzi, związane głównie z semantyką zapożyczeń, zostały zilustrowane konkretnymi przykładami anglicyzmów.

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