INTRODUCTION

English, which is considered a modern lingua franca, influences other languages to a great extent. Its impact on, among other languages, Polish is nowadays especially visible on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

As has been noted, the language of Polish Facebook users abounds in English lexical borrowings. The aim of the present paper is to analyze selected English social media-related loanwords occurring in Polish posts and comments published on Facebook in the period 2014–2017. The study is based on a corpus collected by the author.

The paper presents an overview of the loanwords and refers to the level of their necessity and adaptation to Polish. What is more, the author endeavours to address the entrenchment of the discussed borrowings in Internet discourse, analysing their occurrences on other Polish-language websites.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ON LOANWORDS

Introducing loanwords, also called lexical borrowings/loans, in a recipient language involves taking over the meaning and the form of a given word from a donor language (Haugen 1950). The Oxford Companion to the English Language (McArthur 1992: 623) also stresses the fact that the term loanword refers to an individual word imported from one language to another. Since this understanding of a lexical loan is adopted in the study, structures such as compounds will be excluded from the research material.

With respect to the degree of necessity, the following types of loans can be distinguished (Haugen 1950; Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1995; Zabawa 2011):

• • necessary loans – applied in order to mark new concepts and items that have no names in the recipient language, e.g. pendrive;

• • unnecessary loans – taken over for reasons such as fashion, snobbery, etc. There are counterparts to these words in the recipient language, e.g. sorry;

Loans can also be differentiated in terms of the degree of assimilation into the recipient language (Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1995; Zabawa 2011, 2012):

• • unassimilated loans – there is no morphological adaptation, foreign spelling and pronunciation are preserved, e.g. sorry, fifty-fifty;

• • partly assimilated loans – there is partial adaptation of spelling and pronunciation; the inflection of the words is possible, e.g. tabu (E. taboo);