37.778, FYI: STAL Seminar: Leopold Hess, "Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish 'Murzyn'"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-778. Wed Feb 25 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.778, FYI: STAL Seminar: Leopold Hess, "Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish 'Murzyn'"

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Date: 25-Feb-2026
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar: Leopold Hess, "Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish 'Murzyn'"


The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and
interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on
slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied
languages, invites you to the sixth talk of the 2025-2026 academic
year. The invited speaker is Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University),
who will give a talk entitled "Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish
Murzyn" (see the abstract below). The event will take place online on
Monday, MARCH 9, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part
of the of STAL network seminar series (program here:
https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to
participate, please write to stalnetwork at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this talk is to present and analyze an interesting case
of a word becoming socially recognized as a slur. The case is that of
the Polish word 'Murzyn', referring to people of dark skin or African
descent. It has been in use for centuries, but never been explicitly
deemed offensive or problematic until relatively recently. A few years
ago it became a subject of a wide-ranging and heated public debate,
the result of which was an entirely new almost-consensus among experts
and public actors that it should be in fact considered offensive and
its use should no longer be considered acceptable – even though many
Polish speakers appear to use it as a generally neutral term, without
any offensive or derogatory intentions. There are some important
lessons to be drawn from this case for meaning-theories of slurs, but
there are also puzzling questions regarding the general relevance of
such theories.

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Pragmatics
                     Semantics

Subject Language(s): Polish (pol)




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