The issue of sexism in Polish linguistic thinking

The paper deals with the ways in which the problem of linguistic sexism, deeply rooted and richly represented in the Polish language, has been approached in the relevant linguistic studies. It presents and discusses five major views on this issue: ignoring the problem, reporting it without any evaluative judgements, accepting it as a positive phenomenon, as well as two critical approaches: one which examines the structure of Polish in order to point out the areas of linguistic discrimination of women and the most radical attitude, represented by the so-called feminist linguistics, which aims not only at criticizing linguistic sexism, but which also tries to eliminate it from language. The authors demonstrate that while the latter two views prevail in current linguistic thinking in western countries, the former three approaches appear to dominate in the majority of contemporary studies of Polish.