Tell Me How You Speak, I’ll Tell You Who You Are: Discover Your Linguistic Personality

komunikacja_gettyimages_7.jpg, default, ‘Communication’, photo: Getty Images

Do you follow your heart or your mind when it comes to matters of language? Or perhaps you can’t be bothered about speaking Polish properly? Answer a few questions and find out what your attitude towards language means.

‘Masters’, ‘subjects’ and ‘partners’ of language sometimes appear in the academic literature. These terms testify to a certain hierarchy in the process of interpersonal communication and define the users of the Polish language who present a given attitude towards language. What exactly is this attitude? In general terms, it is a set of relatively stable positions taken on matters of language expressed in public and justified in rational or emotional terms. Understood in this way, attitude is the most essential component of language awareness. Linguists distinguish several types of attitudes (along with their variants), with the proviso that in practice they occur in both ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ forms. Check out which group you belong to.

1.

Fancy a pizza?
(a) And which one specifically do you have in mind: margherita, capricciosa or maybe Hawaiian?
(b) I prefer our Slavic podpłomyk [traditional skillet flatbread, trans].
(c) Stop with the foreign words!

Perfectionism

If you selected answer ‘a’, you certainly don’t enjoy ambiguous situations, you avoid exceptions from afar and you fight against unnecessary innovations. You are simply a perfectionist! Your ideal is an orderly, unambiguous, precise and economical language that reflects a scientific view of the world. It serves primarily as a tool for communication and the formulation of thoughts. When you speak, you only speak in complete sentences, which you never start with ‘so’ or ‘because’. You only use words whose meaning you understand perfectly. You do not know what ‘dimmers’ are; after all, there are only ‘on switches’ or ‘off switches’. If there are two alternatives, for you that’s four possibilities. Chestnuts don’t grow in the park, only chestnut trees do, and if you do have a nut to crack, it’s only a tough one. The most important thing is the system – the linguistic system, of course. Creativity is alien to you, although you sometimes permit change. As a rule, you think rationally, but when you hear inaccuracies in language, you give vent to your emotions.

Conservatism

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‘On the Current Contamination of the Polish Language in the Press’, 1881, photo: Polona National Library

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Those who checked the ‘b’ option value tradition and throw down the gauntlet to the modern generation. They believe that only the language of their youth (and ancestors) was correct, quite precise and sufficient to name necessary phenomena or objects. We are talking about conservatives for whom a pizza will preferably be a Neapolitan flatbread; a high-rise rather than a skyscraper; a jigsaw rather than a puzzle. Their deep knowledge of the language’s history makes them loyal to traditional [14th century] forms such as ‘learned’ and ‘dreamed’, rejecting modern [16th century!] variations such as ‘learnt’ and ‘dreamt’. They can consider as their patron Ludomir Szczerbowicz-Wieczór, who wrote in his brochure O skażeniu obecnem języka polskiego w prasie (On the Current Contamination of the Polish Language in the Press) from 1881:

[…] our language, having such a rich and comprehensive literature, and also in popular speech so rich, illustrative, accurate and expressive, no longer needs enrichment, least of all by artificial means. It will be sufficient if we only use the riches we have accumulated over the centuries, and if, in spite of all the countermeasures and precautions we have shown, something new or a change actually appears in the language […] this will already be a symptom of the general needs of the language, of its general development, regardless of the whims of individuals, who by their own free action can neither bring about nor stop this development.

Purism

Those who lean towards answer ‘c’ are at odds with reason. These language purists are driven by emotion. Therefore if, like Sherlock Holmes, you hunt down mistakes (and even make lists of them and announce them to the world) and care about language more than Kanga in Winnie the Pooh cares about her Roo, you are probably one of them. As befits a purist, you care about the purity of your speech and are passionate about removing unwanted, foreign and new elements. You know no compromise. For you, language is a value in itself. Scholars distinguish several varieties of this attitude. What kind of purist are you?

2.

Choose the position that best suits you:
(a) Let’s purify our language. Polish must be free of all foreign influence.
(b) We should adhere to the exemplary, pre-war version of the Polish language. No changes should be introduced.
(c) As a representative of the old Polish intelligentsia, I will defend our language against colloquialisms and vulgarisms.
(d) It doesn’t matter what others say – I know best!

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Stanisław Szober; ‘Orthoepic Dictionary: How to Speak and Write in Polish’ by Stanisław Szober, title page, 1938, photo: Polona National Library

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Nationalistic purism

La Sibilla Eritrea (Capp. Sistina), designed by Buonarroti Michelangelo, after 1906, photo: Polona National Library

Do you classify words as either native or foreign? Does the use of anglicisms in Polish, such as billboardy, rankingi or fast-foody grind your gears? According to the attitude expressed in subsection ‘a’, your greatest enemies are Germanisms and Russianisms (if you belong to the oldest generation of Poles), as well as the already-mentioned Anglicisms (which have been rampant in the Polish language since the 1990s). For you, ‘pure’ means ‘Polish’. However, consistency is hardly your strong suit. While you may prefer the term słowotok [wordiness] over ‘talk-show’ or truchtajka [trotting] over ‘jogging’, you don’t lose any sleep over more familiar-sounding elements such as dokładnie [exactly], kondycja [condition] or dwa w jednym [two in one]. Perhaps it is worth considering whether perhaps this attitude might be inhibiting the development of the language?

Traditionalist purism

However, if you are closer to the view represented by answer ‘b’, you belong to the traditionalists. You differ from the conservative faction in that, unlike them, you are guided by your heart. Your heart tells you to return to your roots, to the elegant Polish language of the inter-war period. This is a natural attitude, especially for representatives of the older generation who do not accept the casual, incorrect and at times outright vulgar speech of youth. You emphatically say no to the introduction into Polish of phrases that were once considered inappropriate!

Elite purism

Do you identify with ‘c’? You can confidently claim to belong to the noble group of people who combat the use in Polish of terms such as wykon [colloquially: ‘performance’], ekstra, spoko [colloquially: ‘no problem’] or cool. Surely you also share the view of the linguist Stanisław Szober, who considered nobles, land-owning gentry and the urban intelligentsia to be the guardians of linguistic culture. In an article reprinted in his book Na straży języka (Guarding the Language) in 1937, he used a figurative metaphor about ‘the mainland of the Polish literary language, which has been solid ground for centuries’ and which was ‘violently hit by a new wave’ that brought ‘new customs to the surface’.

Egocentric purism

Let us dismiss the opinions of others and focus on you. Since you have checked answer ‘d’, you are well aware that there’s nothing wrong with the way you speak. The right language patterns are learned at home, at school, from one’s surroundings. If you don’t accept something, it’s simply wrong. After all, you are the elite!

3.

During formal business negotiations, your colleague uses colloquialisms. Do you react?
(a) I don’t mind. Variation and stylistic diversity in language should be accepted.
(b) No, after all, language is there to make life easier for people. What matters is to get the job done.
(c) Are you joking? I don’t think about it at all.

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Naked woman, after 1905, photo: Polona National Library

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Liberalism

You bet on the answer ‘a’? Tolerance is thy middle name! You are open to all linguistic innovations, mixing national speech with local dialects and slang. You move easily from official to artistic style in a single utterance. Your list of welcome words includes all manner of merely formal contradictions: podkoszulek as well as podkoszulka [either masculine or feminine gender, trans.], ta żołądź and ten żołądź [either masculine or feminine gender, trans.], wykonuję and wykonywam [two different conjugations, trans.], ‘baby-sitter’, promocja (in the sense of promoting culture, for instance), oszołom [a nut job]. Thus, you expand the boundaries of the Polish language almost indefinitely.

Language liberalism is the opposite of purism, and every variety of purism has an equivalent. Nationalist purism loses handily to cosmopolitan liberalism, since you adore linguistic imports to such an extent that you are willing to acknowledge the superiority of Latin and French (in days of yore) and English (currently) over native speech. Tradition must give way to modernism, whose proponents advocate language reform that makes spelling more similar to pronunciation. If we’ve singled out elitist purism, we must also have egalitarian liberalism – the only correct system is the democracy of language. And finally, there is populist liberalism, which adheres to the principle that if everyone speaks a certain way, that’s the right way to speak.

Laissez-faire

In its extreme form, liberalism takes the form of a laissez-faire approach, whose name comes from French laisser faire, meaning ‘to let be, not to oppose’. So, if you have checked variant ‘b’, you accept most of the phenomena that occur in Polish. You mix tradition with innovation, local forms with colloquial forms. You believe that the primary function of language is to facilitate communication, that it is a self-regulating mechanism whose development should not be hindered. It’s a bit like that 19th-century ‘researcher-botanist’ who describes plants but doesn’t distinguish them from weeds.

Natural attitude (go with the flow)

Why do I even bother with this question if you won’t think twice about how language is used anyway? After all, it’s a ‘natural resource’ that’s used according to non-codified but widely known customs. The natural attitude also known as spontaneity occurs in particular communities. It most often affects users of folk and local dialects and, to a lesser extent, professional dialects (the specific terminology, however, requires some thought).

4.

‘W ręku’ or ‘w ręce’ [both meaning ‘in one’s hand’ but of different grammatical genders]?
(a) After all, the phrase ‘ten rąk’ [masculine] doesn’t exist, so the correct form would be ‘w ręce’.
(b) Given the facts of language, you could say ‘w ręku’, although the other form is recommended.
(c) I have no opinion

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‘Allegory of Indifference…’, pre-1900, photo: Polona National Library

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Make logos logical again

The choice of the first answer is close to perfectionism. In language you are primarily guided not by scientific but rather by everyday logic. So, you can easily distinguish between ‘acts’ and ‘actions’ or ‘childlike’ versus ‘childish’. Besides, you are a diligent observer of reality, and you know that, as a rule, a sapling is small, that you can’t be more or less bald, and if someone ‘będzie śpiewał’, he can’t sing in the future if he’s already sung in the past. [The point here is that the modern future tense is formed by adding the auxiliary word ‘będzie’, meaning ‘he will’ to what used to be a participle and is now a past tense form ‘śpiewał’, meaning ‘sang’, ending up with a seemingly contradictory ‘he will sang’, trans.] Your view is that a ‘nightstand’ should only be used at night, so you would need a ‘day stand’ as well. You completely fail to understand why a single toe among a multitude of toes is referred to when someone says ‘head to toe’. And finally, w ręce and not w ręku! Why? Let’s leave the explanation to the rationalists.

Rationalism

Well, the form w ręku is a remnant of the old dual grammatical number, which was still present in the Polish language at the beginning of the 17th century. Everything that had a pair was declined according to a different pattern than things in the plural. If someone held something w ręku, it was ‘held with both hands’. Professor Jerzy Bralczyk wrote in Poradnia językowa (Language Guide) that ‘this is a generalising expression, not specifying how many hands (of course one person’s) are involved in the holding’. He quoted Mickiewicz’s ‘Ucieczka’ (Escape) in this matter: ‘Moja luba, siodła imaj / Prawą ręką… co masz w ręku?’ (My love, grasp the saddle / with your right hand … what’s in your hand?) and admitted that he was offended by the combination of ‘with your right hand / in your hand’ – because of the [inconsistent] grammatical gender [‘prawą ręka’ is grammatically feminine, but ‘w ręku’ is grammatically masculine in contemporary Polish, trans.].

You are taking a rationalist stance if, when someone asks you about the correct form, your answer is supported by reasoned analysis, you freely cite facts and you keep your emotions in check. Of course, you realise that language evolves, and some changes are necessary. You are willing to accept more and more commonly used forms, even if they were once seen as wrong. One can only envy such an attitude; it is just a pity that it occurs so rarely in nature. Humanists, linguists, many writers and columnists readily admit to it, but most often it is merely their idealised self-image.

Indifferent-ism

W ręku, w ręce… Who cares? On tests concerning proper speech – if, by chance, you take them – you always check the ‘I have no opinion’ option because matters of language are completely irrelevant to you. Language is of no value to you. If, in addition, you act in a fully conscious manner, you are a linguistic abnegator and can exhibit a tendency to violate the prevailing norms – the only advantage of this attitude is that you must know the rules in order to break them.

_Sources:

_{Bralczyk, J., Gruszczyński, W., and Kłosińska, K., eds.}_{Wiem, co mówię, czyli o dobrej komunikacji}_{. Gdańsk, 2002.}

_{Markowski, A.}_{Kultura języka polskiego. Teoria. Zagadnienia leksykalne}_{. Warsaw, 2007.}

_{Postawy wobec języka. Raport}_{. Warsaw, 2017. Accessed online 9 March 2021.}

Translated by Michał Niedzielski

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