Kiedy swój staje się obcym
When one of us becomes one of them

Summary/Abstract: In the theory of stereotypes, the “us-them” opposition is usually associated with inter-ethnic relations, but the conception of foreignness may also appear within a single ethnic group. The peasant-dialectal collective noun Polactwo ‘Polishness’ was in the 1930’s popularized by Edmund Osmańczyk as the name of a “community fighting for a single cause”. Several decades later, through a book by Rafał Ziemkiewicz, the same word gained currency as a contemptuous term for a passive, distrustful, backward portion of the Polish post-socialist society. The word thus became an example of enantosemy: a semanticfunctional split of one and the same word into two opposite lexicalsemantic and axiological variants. The analysis of other words derived from Polska ‘Poland’, Polak ‘Pole’ (polskość, polackość ‘Polishness’, polskojęzyczny ‘Polish-speaking’) shows that the enantosemy seems to infiltrate the whole contemporary Polish discourse, revealing deep divisions in the identity of Poles.

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