Linguistic purism

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Polish. (December 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Polish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 303 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Polish Wikipedia article at [[:pl:Puryzm (językoznawstwo)]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|pl|Puryzm (językoznawstwo)}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (August 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept having a dual notion with respect to foreign languages and with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects) The first meaning is the historical trend of every language to conserve intact its lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered 'impure'. The second meaning is the practice, possibly prescriptive,^[1] of determining and recognizing one linguistic variety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties.

The perceived or actual decline identified by the purists may take the form of a change of vocabulary, syncretism of grammatical elements, or loanwords.^{[citation needed]} The unwanted similarity is often with a neighboring language the speakers of which are culturally or politically dominant.^{[citation needed]} The ideal may invoke logic, clarity, or the grammar of classic languages. It is often presented as a conservative measure, as a protection of a language from the encroachment of other languages or of the conservation of the national Volksgeist, but is often innovative in defining a new standard. It is sometimes part of governmental language policy that is enforced in various ways.

The practice opposite of purism, when borrowed words displace native ones, also exists. For example, in English, the native word bookstaff (German: Buchstabe) was replaced by the Latin word letter.