Joanna Sobczykowa’s article deals with Latin as a sacred language in the Polish cultural area in history and today. Sobczykowa outlines the situation in other areas of culture, Semitic or Slavic. She examines the status and functions of liturgical Latin in history and today, by looking at opinions of speakers, theologians, linguists, and philosophers of religion. She also looks at documents in the form of Latin works by medieval Polish preachers and their concern for the understanding of the Latin liturgy by the people. Finally, she shows and stresses the difference between verbal and spiritual understanding present in meditation and that between the tendencies towards sacralization and desacralization.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the formulas of the aspiration prayers from a historical, theological and linguistic perspective, in order to outline a complete picture of these religious texts. The discussed phenomenon, whose origins date back to the first centuries of Christianity, is widely represented in the Italian tradition, both in past centuries and today. The aspiration prayers from the prayer manuals of the 17th–19th centuries, as well as the texts of the prayers printed on sacred images, were subjected to a multidimensional analysis, focused on linguistic, functional and textual specificities. The research made it possible to contextualize the aspiration prayer in the frame of the model prayer text, first of all exposing its rich expressive values. The analysis of the linguistic material has proved a stability of the form of the aspiration prayer over the centuries. All the prayers analyzed have a strictly personal character, which results among other things from the strong expressiveness of the formulas, achieved with the adoption of terms usually associated with amorous confessions.

The object of observation is criminal jargon from the 19th century. The description concerns lexis belonging to the thematic field religion. The text shows little known (or even unknown) historical vocabulary of the environment. The author focuses on presenting the etymology of the collected words. Some remarks on the origin of words have the character of hypotheses and are a pretext for further discussion. The author excerpts linguistic material from Słownik mowy złodziejskiej by Antoni Kurka (1896) and Szwargot więzienny by Karol Estreicher (1903, this publication gathers vocabulary from Estreicher’s works published several decades earlier). The author evaluates the stability of the vocabulary and the development of the lexis – he compares the 19th-century material with notations appearing in the later work Żargon mowy przestępczej by Wiktor Ludwikowski and Henryk Walczak (published in 1922).

 In her article, Ewa Masłowska describes wandering or vagabond beggars and their epic poems and songs in the broad context of the Polish and Slavic traditional folk or rural culture. Masłowska emphasizes the Marian cult specific to the Polish beggar sung poetry. Another particular feature of these songs is the domination of moral themes over events. Another distinctive feature is the presence of eschatological themes, particularly matters such as death, redemption, the soul’s fate after death, the end of the world, and the Last Judgement. What is common for the singing beggars in the Slavic lands is church protection (both in the Orthodox and Catholic countries), which determines their role in the rural society as a facilitator of the Christian religion. Important is also the cult of the ancestors, which was the basis of the beggars’ role in agricultural celebrations and rites of passage, as villagers perceived them as mediatory figures.

Małgorzata Haładewicz-Grzelak’s aim in this article is to present the epistemological potential of the semiotactic model in analysis of the cultural opposition of sacred/profane. The research area is the socially constructed cultural space, defined as the sacrosphere. The semiotactic model is based on the insights of contemporary phonology (see e.g. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, 2009) and examines the possibilities of combining signs and their postulated primes. In the paradigm defined in this way, I focus on defining some of the semiotic processes to which selected hieratic markers of the sacrosphere are subject (elements of St. Nicholas’ iconography, roadside shrines and the Moses Tablets). In particular I focus on the simplification of the internal structure of the sign I also discuss heuristically isolated components of a hieratic sign, such as directionality with variants, elevatio and locativus.

In their article, Rafał Młyński and Elżbieta Sadowska examine the broad problem of communication disorders in the context of childhood bilingualism and, in particular, research on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They give an overview of topics related to ASD in the context of bilingualism as addressed by researchers in international and Polish publications and examine their theoretical and practical implications. They used the thus collected literature on the subject to formulate postulates useful for further Polish research on the communication of bilingual children with autism spectrum disorders. The most important of them is raising awareness that children with autism spectrum can grow up in a bilingual environment and depriving them of their heritage language can have many negative consequences.

The aim of this paper is to describe and compare the linguistic dimension of the ritual of dining among Polish and Spanish speakers. The act of feasting, very important for the analysed cultures, not only does present a specific scheme, but it is also accompanied by a range of linguistic mechanisms introduced in concrete interactive situations. The present article exposes the most frequent speech acts, ritualized expressions and pragmaticalized constructions that are used during the ritual of dining in the Polish and Spanish communities. The analysis is based on the examples from oral language corpora, created in Poland and in Spain, that is transcriptions of everyday conversations of the members of described communities. The research has shown that both communities share a lot of common values related to dining, nevertheless each one of them presents some characteristic linguistic mechanisms used during the ritual.

The article contains a review of Kazimierz Ożóg's book Polskie pieśni religijne. Aspekty językowe i kulturowe [Polish religious songs. Linguistic and cultural aspects] (2022). The reviewed monograph is part of the research on religious language that has been conducted for several decades and is the result of Kazimierz Ożóg's studies on the language and the role of religious songs in the lives of Poles. The author of the review highly appreciates the various linguistic instruments used in the analytical part of the monograph and the setting of the research in a broad cultural context. He considers the publication's value to be its structured composition, which he discusses in detail, pointing to the content of individual chapters. The review is descriptive, does not contain polemical elements, and its author clearly assesses the described monograph as interesting, valuable and characterized by great cognitive value.

The article contains a polemical review of the book by Bolesław (Wasyl) Bawolak Łemkowskie przysłowia i powiedzenia ze Świątkowej Wielkiej i okolic (2021). The reviewed publication contains a collection of almost 7,000 proverbs and sayings, differentiated by geographical area (Lemko and Ukrainian), dating (old and new) and the way they were obtained (heard or taken from written sources). The author of the review raises doubts about the criteria on the basis of which such diverse material can be considered representative of the inhabitants of Świątkowa Wielka and the surrounding area. The reviewer also asks about the authenticity of the message contained in the proverbs, which Bolesław Bawolak subjected to linguistic transformation. She considers the method of organizing the paremiological material to be complicated – the division into 10 lexical-semantic fields, to which keywords are assigned, listed according to the order of the Latin alphabet, preceding groups of proverbs arranged according to the Cyrillic alphabet. Despite the indicated doubts, the author of the review considers the described publication to be a valuable source of linguistic material and testimony to Lemko culture.