The contribution presents the main events in the life of Wojciech Chlebda (1950–2022), an eminent linguist, Polish and Slavic philologist, preoccupied throughout his career with the subject status of individuals and communities, as well as with the language‑culture interface. The main areas of his research, including the major tenets of his linguistic proposals, are also characterized, relating to the issues of phrasematics (speaker phraseology), lexicography as an instrument of national self‑identification, linguistic self‑identity, mental geography, and collective linguistic (non‑)memory.