Introduction

Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld has extensively and expertly studied English-Polish language contact contributing to a better understanding of cultural and linguistic changes occurring in Poland over the last decades. Whereas her studies analyse and document the English loanwords in Polish, this note discusses elements of Celtic origin present in contemporary Polish vocabulary. Section 2 of the paper briefly introduces the phenomenon of language contact, Section 3 lists the ancient Celtic elements which found their way into Polish (and numerous other modern languages), Section 4 presents the more recent borrowings from Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton, and Section 5 mentions the most recent cases of possible direct borrowings.

Language contact and borrowings

The term language contact can refer to a process, state, result of the process, or the appropriate field of research. Probably the most concise definition of language contact understood as a process/state has been provided by Sarah G. Thomason: “Language contact is the use of more than one language in the same place at the same time” (Thomason 2001: 1). As the same author points out, “language contact is the norm, not the exception” (Thomason 2001: 10). It is necessary to remember that language contact is “really the contact of one community with another, and the effect that contact has on their respective language behavior” (Wheeler 2015: 76); furthermore, languages in contact “are, after all, the result of people in contact and of communities of people of different language backgrounds in contact” (Clyne 2003: 1), and:

However, for ease of exposition, the metaphorical form will be used throughout this paper.