Abstract
The article deals with the presence of the word amba in the Polish language. Apparently, in contemporary Polish the noun functions in numerous new meanings. Referring to contemporary tendencies and phenomena, the author proves that word amba, of jargon origin, was spread and became a tool of communication between social and ethnic groups. The lexeme amba was well-known in the 19th century, but only became a fashionable word in its final years. The author discusses two paths of the word’s development: „Russian”, associated with Russian partition of Poland, which comprised a few of its regions including Mazowsze (amba is a word borrowed from Russian criminal dialects and Polish argot or jargon is an intermediary); and „German”, connected with the linguistic situation in the Prussian partition (various meanings of word amba are the result of neo-semantization of German loanwords). Today’s semantics of the word depends on the source of the loan, since the word was present both in the Russian and German languages.
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