Nederlandse woorden in het Pools: hoezo?

Abstract

This article discusses the problem of Dutch borrowings in the Polish language. The primary question is why some words from one language come to be introduced into another one. Taking some thematic groups of the borrowings as an example, the author proves a thesis, that Dutch loanwords are chiefly of pragmatic character, meaning, that they came in handy to fill some blanks in the Polish vocabulary. The majority of words borrowed from Dutch and assimilated into Polish were either the names of the objects of Dutch origin or came to Poland by the agency of the Dutch native speakers.