Moby respią się dla leveli – a Corpus-Based Study of English Lexical Influence on the Polish Community of Minecraft Gamers
Moby respią się dla leveli – a Corpus-Based Study of English Lexical Influence on the Polish Community of Minecraft Gamers

Summary/Abstract: Polish online gamers remain in continuous contact with English, either while playing games, communicating with other gamers or using social media. Given the relative intensity of language contact, one may expect gaming sociolect to be a rich source of anglicisms of various type. Nevertheless, the influence that English exerts on the sociolect of Polish gamers has attracted little scholarly attention thus far. The present paper aims at investigating anglicisms occurring in the sociolect of Polish Minecraft gamers, basing on the corpus compiled from 21 YouTube gaming videos and 10 Internet forum threads devoted to the game. More specifically, the author seeks to analyze to which extent the loanwords are adapted into Polish in terms of phonology, morphology and spelling as well as to discuss the examples of calques and hybrids that have been attested in the corpus. Additionally, the paper tries to identify the meaning and function of borrowed elements. Overall, the corpus gathers 122 loanwords (simple lexemes, compound nouns and acronyms), 20 calques and 1 hybrid loan. The analysis has shown preliminarily that although a majority of loanwords is integrated into the Polish language in terms of morphology and phonology, nearly all elements retain their original spelling. Moreover, the corpus reveals a group of lexemes whose pronunciation is based on spelling, which indicates the fact that lexemes are transferred to the sociolect of gamers in a twofold way, namely graphic and spoken. As for the use of loanwords, the study exemplifies both anglicisms used exclusively in the Minecraft community as well as those constituting a universal part of the lexical repertoire of all gamers and thus points out the diversity of the gaming sociolect.

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