Polish Language

Polish Language (in Polish, polski), a member of the Western group of the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages and thus related to Czech, Slovak, and the Sorbian languages found in Germany (see Slavic Languages). It is most closely related to Kashubian and Polabian, with which it is a member of the Lechitic sub-group of the Western Slavic languages. It is spoken by 42.7 million people including 98 per cent of the inhabitants of Poland and several million native speakers in Canada, Germany, Israel, Russia and the other successor states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United States, and elsewhere. Polish dialects tend to correspond with the historical divisions of the country and include Little Poland (Malopolska) in the south-east, Upper Silesian (Silesia) in the central south, Great Poland (Wielkopolska) spoken in the Wielkopolski region in western Poland, and Mazovia in the Masuria region in the north-east. Kashubian, or Cassubian, also heard in the north, is sometimes treated as a dialect of Polish, although it evolved as a separate West Slavic language, with German influences.

Contemporary Polish has 7 vowel sounds and 35 consonant sounds, depicted by a modified Latin alphabet. Sounds that are not represented by the alphabet are indicated by digraphs such as sz and cz (resembling English sh and ch) and by diacritics such as ż and ś (resembling zh and a soft sh), derived from Czech. Unique to Polish is the letter “l” with a stroke (ł), resembling an English “w” in pronunciation. In the course of its evolution, Polish lost the distinction between long and short vowels, and word accent became fixed on the penultimate syllable. Polish is the only Slavic language with nasal vowels (a and e), which are derived from Old Slavic nasal vowels. Of the original singular, dual, and plural, the dual has disappeared (as in most Slavic languages). The singular has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; the plural developed a new category, personal masculine gender (for human males), which is distinguished from a common plural gender for all other categories. Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system: six cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, plus a seventh case, the vocative (for direct address) for nouns and pronouns. Verbs are inflected according to gender as well as person and number, but the tense forms have been simplified through elimination of three old tenses (the aorist, imperfect, and past perfect). The so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in common speech. Word order remains highly flexible.

The oldest known examples of written Polish are names and glosses in Latin documents (notably a papal bull of 1136). Modern literary Polish emerged in the 16th century and was based on the dialects of the area around Poznań, in western Poland. Although the core of literary Polish has remained pure, loan-words were absorbed from medieval Czech and German, from Latin, and, more recently, from such languages as Belorussian, Ukrainian, French, and English.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.