Evolution of Polish Lexis in the Decade Following the Introduction of the National Corpus of Polish: A Keyword Analysis

Abstract

The paper reports on the results of an examination of changes in Polish lexis over the past decade. Two different, multi-million corpora spanning the years 2011–2022 were contrasted with a subset of the balanced National Corpus of Polish, which covers the period until 2010. To this end, keyword analysis was employed, and words that are particularly characteristic of the more recent set of texts, compared to the older corpus, were automatically extracted. This allowed us to identify the most salient lexical trends which differentiate the language of the last decade from the one recorded in the National Corpus of Polish, and which point to significant extralinguistic socio-cultural, economic, and political shifts across time. Keywords: corpus linguistics – National Corpus of Polish – language change – diachronic research – keyword analysis.