Names of women in the dialects of Warmia and Masuria

Abstract

This article presents more than 300 semantic units being names of women used in the area of Warmia and Masuria in the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century in traditional rural communities. It discusses the semantic diversity of particular groups of lexemes, presents their number, and indicates the extralinguistic reasons which caused the growth of the number of feminine names within certain semantic fields. It also confronts certain specialised sets of lexemes, e.g. the names of unmarried women, with their male counterparts