Feminatives – professional titles and academic degrees. What are they and how to use them?

Feminatives – professional titles and academic degrees. Position of the Polish Language Council

Few issues related to the Polish language are as controversial as . Occupational titles and the very names of professions are one of the battlefields of this war. At the same time, it is conducted in a ruthless way – the parties to the dispute consistently avoid feminatives or use them in every situation. Who’s right? Let the experts speak.

The date of November 2019 is of great importance here. It is this body, established by the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1996, that issues opinions on all matters regarding the use of the Polish language in public communication. The same was true of feminists. What are the conclusions of the Council’s position on them? Above all:

• the discussion about feminine forms is not new, because it has been going on for over a hundred years;
• a hundred years ago, the tendency to create feminatives prevailed, but the opposite tendencies also remained alive. It is especially about marking femininity with the help of the noun ‘pani’ (”pani professor”) or the use of syntactical associations (”our professor decided”);
• since the 1990s there has been an increase in the popularity of feminine forms of personal nouns (e.g. ”politologka”, ”sociologist”);
• The council rejected most of the arguments used against creation;
• creating feminine names by changing the inflectional endings (e.g. this ”doktora”) is not natural for the Polish language, so ”doktorka” or ”pani doktor” will be a better choice;
• the dispute over feminine forms cannot be settled either by tradition, because it is diverse, or by the rules of the linguistic system.

One of the sentences contained in the extremely balanced position of the Council seems to be very accurate:

The right to use female names should be left to the speakers, bearing in mind that in addition to the recent calls for the creation of feminatives in the media, there is resistance to their use. Not everyone will talk about a female guest or professor, even if she herself articulates such an expectation.

Feminatives – professional titles and academic degrees. Dictionary with historical expressions

So how do feminatives relate to professional titles? A dictionary can help here – especially when we reach for one of its versions from the past. It turns out that some currently controversial female names were used a hundred, two hundred or more years ago. Here are some examples:

• ”admiralka” as ”an admiral’s office” appeared already in Samuel Bogumił Linde’s Dictionary of the Polish Language from 1807;
• ‘engineer’ appeared in the etymological dictionary of the Polish language from 1927;
• ”premiere” in the humorous and satirical magazine ”Satyr” from 1918.

Feminatives – professional titles and academic degrees. A list worth knowing

List of feminatives in professional titles? Such a list could be very long. Here, however, it is worth giving a few examples of degrees, professional titles and names of professions:

• architect;
• apprentice;
• doctor;
• president;
• psychologist;
• sociologist;
• political scientist;
• nurse;
• lecturer.

Feminatives – professional titles and academic degrees. How to address yourself at the university?

Feminatives and degrees? How to address people who are employed at the university? In this case, you can successfully talk about a “doktorka” or “professor”. Feminine forms such as ‘lecturer’, ‘adjunct’ and ‘academiczka’ are also associated with the academic world. However, the most controversial is the ‘dean’, which does not sound very natural. Therefore, a better choice would be ”madam dean”.

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