Adam Mickiewicz’s Polish-French bilingualism : towards linguistic anthropology

The article introduces a new issue in the Polish linguistic research on bilingualism: the bilingualism of the Polish men of letters. The specific case being analyzed is Adam Mickiewicz’s Polish-French bilingualism presented from the perspective of linguistic anthropology as defined by André Jacob. His thirty one-year-long life in the French and Polish environment was the origin of existing in Mickiewicz’s idiolect the contacts of language codes: Polish (the poet’s first language - L1 ) and French (the poet’s second language - his L2 ). Adam Mickiewicz’s bilingualism was acquired in his mature years; it evolved from the initially dominating in L1 and probably coordinate towards the balanced and compound bilingualism due to Adam Mickiewicz’s increased competence in French. At that time French became for Mickiewicz functionally the first language in which the poet worked and communicated in the monolingual environment of L2 . Reflected in the Letters, Adam Mickiewicz’s bilingual language behavior was the result of the adopted communication strategy: it was based, on the one hand, on separating two codes (using code switching or code mixing), and on the other hand, on the overlapping of elements/structures of L1 and L2 - interference. For the writer/poet the problem of attitude towards the contacts of the languages is specific, because language is for him the material of artistic expression. For Adam Mickiewicz, who was forced to use actively two codes, it was the second language - French - that became the language in which he created press, political and scientific humanistic discourse. Thus, the languages that he used became connected with the genres of texts created by Mickiewicz