Kieszonkowy atlas języków warszawskich. Cztery Marie – cztery języki – cztery Warszawy (w powieści Sylwii Chutnik,Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet)
The Pocket Atlas of Warsaw Languages. Four Maries – Four Languages – Four Worlds (in Sylwia Chutnik’s Novel Women. Pocket Atlas)

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the language used by the characters and narrators of Sylwia Chutnik’s first novel. Divided into four parts, Chutnik’s “atlas” lists diff erent figures of social exclusion: poverty and madness, Jewish origins and old age, sexual otherness and immaturity, as they are represented by the four Maries (Czarna Mańka, Maria, Marian, and Marysia) living in the same pre-war building in one of Warsaw’s popular districts (Ochota). Each of the protagonists belongs to a different social environment, culture, and language.The present study focuses on the aspect of language, understood as a system of cultural references, superimposed on the „new dialect of Warsaw” of the beginning of the 21st century. This “language” is conveyed via different texts of cultures, integrated in the novel: Warsaw ballads of the pre-war period, popular love songs exploiting the post-romantic imaginary, maxims, sentences and epigrams, and finally, echoes of the politically engaged discourse of anarcho-feminists, this multitude of “languages” leading to deterioration of communication between the characters.

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