Bartmiński studied Polish philology and in 1971 earned his PhD, focusing his research on the language of folklore.

[1] As a young scholar at Lublin's Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, he established, together with his wife and children, one of the first groups of the home church Catholic renewal movement in Poland.

[7] From 1976, he led the research team that has been reorganized as the Department of Textology and Grammar of Contemporary Polish Language.

[8] For several years, he had been the chairman of jury of folklore songs festival in Kazimierz Dolny, one of the largest events of this kind in Central Europe.

One of his last books, Linguistic Bases of the Perception of the World (Jezykowe podstawy obrazu swiata, 2007), is considered to be among the most significant Polish publications in the disciplines of the humanities.