Nieosobowy

Nieosobowy is a Polish adjective meaning “not personal” or “impersonal.” In linguistics and grammar it describes forms or constructions that do not express a specific personal subject. The term is typically contrasted with osobowy, which denotes forms that include a person as the subject. Nieosobowy can refer to non-personal verb forms as well as to non-finite clauses, and it is often used to describe impersonal sentences and impersonal predicates.

In practice, bezosobowe konstrukcje include sentences like Pada deszcz and Wieje wiatr; these convey phenomena or states without referencing a person as the agent, and the subject is not a living being. Polish uses the concept to describe situations where the action occurs independently of a personal actor. The distinction between personal and non-personal forms appears in descriptive grammars and language teaching as a way to explain how Polish handles subjectless or non-human statements.

Outside of pure linguistics, the term also appears in everyday and technical language. It can describe non-identifiable data (dane nieosobowe) or accounts and forms that do not pertain to an identifiable person, such as in data protection and privacy contexts. The etymology is straightforward: from prefix nie- meaning “not” or “non-” and osobo- related to osoba, “person.”

See also: osobowy, bezosobowy, dane nieosobowe.