The understanding of the gentiles Polacy, Niemcy, Francuzi and Europejczycy by contemporary Polish youth: an ethnolinguistic study.

Summary Our study takes as its object the way Polish youth today understand European gentiles such as Polacy (Poles), Niemcy (Germans) and Francuzi (French), as well as the gentile Europejczycy (Europeans) itself, several years after Poland's accession to the European Union, following the fall of the communist regime. These two relatively recent historical events are indeed likely to have affected the perception of the world of Poles. By apprehending the meaning of the above-mentioned gentiles through the vision of a community of speakers, the young Polish speakers, this study is part of the linguistic current of cognitive research. In the study of the semantic structures of language, this research emphasizes the fundamental link between language and thought and aims at reaching the speaking subject (as a member of a community of speakers), his perception, his conceptualization of the world (linked to his experience) and his value system. Our study thus adheres more particularly to the current of Lublin ethnolinguistics as defined by Jerzy Bartmiński, according to which we cannot look for the meaning of the gentiles Polacy, Niemcy, Francuzi, and Europejczycy in dictionaries, since it is primarily found, so to speak, in the heads of the speakers.