Languages in contact and contrast

The Festschrift is a collection of papers written in honour of Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld to mark the occasion of her 70th birthday.

Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld is one of the leading authorities in the field of language contact, and has pursued research on the influence of English on Polish and other European languages, Polish-English contrastive studies, as well as various aspects of English grammar. She has authored more than 160 publications, including four books, as well as course books and academic papers. She has also edited and co-edited dictionaries of English borrowings in Polish.

The Festschrift volume comprises papers from the world of linguistics which have been authored by eminent scholars from Poland and abroad. The chapters included in the volume focus on various issues, including those from the area of contact linguistics. The topics covered in the research papers comprise, for instance, the influence of English on different languages, such as Polish, Danish, Afrikaans, Swedish, Spanish, German and Japanese, as well as on Asian languages and cultures. The authors investigate Celtic borrowings in Polish, anglicisms in Serbian, or Yiddish borrowings in contemporary American English. The contributions also discuss the phenomenon of Ponglish, i.e., the communication code used by Poles living in the UK, the presence of foreign languages in the linguistic landscape of Kraków, as well as the problem of multilingualism in Europe, the relation between language, culture and identity, and the influence of globalisation on both Polish language and culture. Finally, selected chapters address a range of phenomena related to Karaim, Russenorsk, and Turkish.