Maria Szymańska is a researcher, a lecturer and a self-taught polyglot affiliated to the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Lodz. Her passion for learning languages had evolved into fascination with human communication, which she further developed into an academic career.

She supports the holistic and integrational approach to analysing language. Her research interests lie in the fields of sociopragmatics, linguistic studies on gender, discourse analysis, and Internet linguistics. Her recent academic work focuses on the language of drag performance and the language used within the drag community. In her most current research, she has been interested in gender stereotypes reflected in language. She wrote a doctoral dissertation on gendered neologisms and their role in introducing social change.

• sociopragmatics
• neology
• language and gender
• language of drag queens
• Internet linguistics