Losy posłanki w języku polskim
History of the Word posłanka in Polish

Summary/Abstract: The subject of the article is the occurrence of the word posłanka [female member of parliament] in Polish, referring to a member of the lower house of parliament. The sources used in the study are primarily Polish dictionaries and corpora, including the Corpus of Parliamentary Discourse and the National Corpus of the Polish Language. The discussion on the nomination of women in parliament in the pages of “Poradnik Językowy” (“Linguistuic Manual”), an interwar periodical dedicated to the culture of language, was also examined. The need to create a name for a woman holding an office in the parliament of deputy was a consequence of her obtaining the right to run for the office, which occurred in 1918 by decree of the Polish president. The records of the proceedings of the Parliament of the Second Polish Republic confirm the presence of the name posłanka, the frequency of which gradually increased from the first mention in 1922 to 120 appearances in the 3rd term. The term posłanka also has numerous confirmations from the sessions of the Parliament of the Polish People’s Republic but, due to the low rank and limited decision-making power of this institution, it disappeared from public use. Its presence in the 1980s is not recorded in the National Corpus of the Polish Language. It returned in the 1990s with the opinion of a neologism and a deprecating name.

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