Recognizing Slurs: The Case of Polish "Murzyn"

Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University)

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 [email protected] 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.