Tobacco was certainly one of the most popular drug products in Europe until the end of the 20th century. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the history of its designations is fairly often limited to general statements like, for instance, “from Spanish” (for English tobacco) or “from Turkish” (for Polish tytoń) and so on. This author aims at establishing some lexicological areas displaying various influences on the Slavic languages in that respect, as well as providing critical assessment of earlier claims and presenting his own observations concerning the Slavic designations of ‘tobacco’.

Since electronic communication became widespread, one of the typical features identified in e-language and commented on, also as an aspect of linguistic analyses, has been acronyms and abbreviated language of various kinds. It has been particularly visible in English, as this language, unlike many others, shows great flexibility with regard to such modifications, mainly due to homophony between numerous words and individual sounds as well as lack of inflectional endings, which otherwise would limit the abbreviation options. However, the current overview of a selection of social networking sites does not appear to demonstrate any striking presence of this marker of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The present analysis therefore attempts to investigate the contemporary status of online language abbreviations in English, with the aim of discovering the actual visibility and frequency of use of such items as well as identifying their most popular forms found online. In particular, the research focuses on three social networking sites, i.e. Facebook (private accounts and fanpages), YouTube, and Twitter, trying to establish which factors contribute to the preference for abbreviations: the limitation of the post length, the degree of informality and closeness to the post addressees or the anonymity of the post author. Additionally, the investigation also takes into account the nationality of the users, and notably the status of English as their first or second language, as well as their gender, on the assumption that these variables play a significant role in the selection of this aspect of online discourse.

This is a paper in two parts, both dealing with the localization of the concept of English as a “world” or “global language”. In the first part, a number of general notions like “globalization” are discussed, and a plea is made for studying the role of any language in a given context ecologically, i.e. in relationship to, and in interaction with, other languages.

Didżej and didżejować appeared in Polish due to language contact and loanword assimilation processes; the former is the English noun DJ in graphic disguise, the latter is a Polish verbal derivative that conceals the English etymon. The article focuses on discussing and exemplifying the multiple ways in which English acronyms and alphabetisms are assimilated and integrated in the Polish lexical and grammatical systems. Part 1 of the article concerns loanword adaptation processes that have been identified for English lexical loans in several European languages. The linguistic outcomes of loanword adaptation processes, which both occur during the borrowing process and follow it, serve to support an observation that intensive lexical borrowing from English is a change-provoking and development-motivating process that leads to linguistic diversity rather than linguistic homogeneity. An illustration of contact-induced linguistic diversity with corpus-driven data is preceded with a brief discussion of English abbreviations, which, in Part 2, are contrasted with their “polonized” versions that undergo formal, semantic and pragmatic changes in the recipient language.

The present paper offers an analysis of the TAM semantics of the HĨ and the HA gram(matical construction)s in Tjwao within the cognitive and grammaticalization-based model of dynamic maps and streams. The authors show that, albeit similar, the ranges of meanings of the two grams differ. The grams share the senses of experiential present perfect, definite past, stative and non-stative present. However, the senses of narrative remote past and pluperfect are typical of HĨ, while the senses of inclusive and resultative present perfect are only compatible with HA. When used as presents, HA is limited to affirmative contexts, whereas HĨ is restricted to negative contexts. The authors additionally demonstrate that the polysemy of each gram can be mapped by means of two sub-paths of the resultative path, i.e. the anterior and simultaneous paths. The two grams may therefore be located on the same stream on which HĨ occupies a more advanced position than HA, being thus a chronologically earlier construction. This grammaticalization-based entanglement of HĨ and HA is consistent with the situation found in other Khoe languages

The present article deals with the Tajik language used in modern public inscriptions (sign-boards, sign-posts, billboard advertisements, political banners, etc.) documented in about 400 photographs taken in Tajikistan by various individuals in recent years. Some sociolinguistic problems are discussed (especially in the case of multilingual inscriptions) as well as morphology, vocabulary, word-formation and syntax of the texts in question.