Abstract

The interwar period and the first two decades of the 21st century are separated by almost a century, which invites reflection on the developmental elements of the interwar Polish language that are present in contemporary Polish, and on their status. An analysis of a sample of 44 features/processes/trends allowed us to identify 25 of them as “valid” in contemporary Polish, i.e., those that are both entrenched and active (productive): phonetics – 1, inflection – 7, syntax – 7, word formation – 4, vocabulary – 5, stylistics – pragmatics – communication – 1. Their activity may be progressive (18) or regressive (7). Among them, the exponents of the lexical and word-formative strata should be considered predominant, and the external and extra-linguistic factors are fundamental in determining the activity of syntactic, word-formative, lexical, and stylistic-pragmatic-communicative features in the 20th century. The processes of (re)valuation of the components of the development of the Polish language confirm the continuity of its evolution and reveal the dynamics of changes in its individual structural subsystems.