THE LEXIS OF POLISH SEXUAL MINORITIES SLANG

The paper discusses the Polish slang of homosexuals and transgender people. The main aim of the paper is to marshal scattered records of gay lexicon and to characterize the data semantically and grammatically. The first part of the paper presents the phenomenon of the Polish gay slang (with reference to Polari ? the language of the English gays) found in literary data. Next, the paper analyses the vocabulary enlisted in the only printed minidictionary of Polish gay and lesbian slang. Finally, other amateur glossaries of gay slang are discussed, mainly records gleaned from online articles and blogs concerning homosexual and transsexual communities. The main part of the paper revolves around the classification of the linguistic material into semantic and phraseological neologisms, neologisms based on word formation processes and borrowings. The paper sets course for future research on the Polish slang of sexual minorities.