Polish 
Witamy! "welcome"
Witamy! "welcome"
Introduction|
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Polish belongs to the west Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Its closest living relatives are 
Polish is the national language of Poland, one of the most linguistically homogeneous countries in Europe with 97% of its population claiming Polish as their first language. it is used in all official, social, and personal communications. 
Dialects
Polish has a number of mutually intelligible dialects. The main ones include:
- Wielkopolski (Greater Polish), spoken in western Poland, including the city of Poznan;
- Malopolski (Lesser Polish), spoken in southern and southeastern Poland, including the cities of Lodz, Lublin, and Krakow;
- Silesian, spoken in southcentral Poland;
- Mazovian (Mazur), spoken in northeastern Poland, including the capital of Warsaw, which shares some features with Kashubian;
Structure
Sound System
Polish has a relatively simple vowel system and a complex consonantal system characterized by a large number of affricates.
Vowels
There are 6 oral and 2 nasal vowels which only Polish has retained from Proto-Slavic. Nasal vowels are marked in writing by a diacritic, called ogonek (Polish for "little tail"), e.g., ą and ę. There is no vowel length.
Consonants
The Polish consonant system is quite complicated. Among its characteristic features are the following:
- a series of alveolar, post-alveolar, and alveo-palatal affricates, represented in writing by diacritics, digraphs, or both;
- palatal consonants, which marked in writing either by an acute accent or followed by the vowel i;
Polish allows many different kinds of consonant clusters. Voiced consonants are devoiced and voiceless consonants are voiced in consonant clusters, e.g., vodka is pronounced as /votka/, and jakby "as if" is pronounced as /yagby/. This does not apply to /l/, /m/, /n/, or /r/.
Stress
Stress in Polish words normally falls on the penultimate (next to the last) syllable in a word.
Click here to listen to a few common phrases in Polish.
Polish is a richly inflected language with a grammar that is very similar to that of other Slavic languages.
Nouns
Polish nouns are marked for gender, number, and case. The three are fused into one ending, as is the case in all Slavic languages. Polish nouns have the following grammatical categories:
- gender: masculine, feminine, neuter;
- number: singular, plural, with some vestiges of dual;
- case: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, vocative, however only a few nouns have retained the vocative forms;
- animate and inanimate nouns have different endings in the accusative case;
- there are no indefinite or definite articles.
All modifiers agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case.
Verbs
Polish verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They are marked for the following categories:
- three persons (first, second, third);
- two numbers (singular and plural);
- three tenses (present, past, future; present and future have the same endings);
- two aspects (imperfective and perfective); perfective is usually formed by prefixation;
- three moods (indicative, imperative, conditional);
- three voices (active, middle, and passive).
Polish aspect involves grammar, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics. Perfective verbs are formed by prefixation. The system is complex enough to have occupied generations of linguists and frustrated generations of learners.
Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Polish verbs. They are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes.
Word order
The neutral word order in Polish is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are possible. Inflectional endings take care of keeping clear grammatical relations and roles in the sentence. Word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and focus (new information). Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry the most emphasis.
Most of Polish vocabulary is derived from Common Slavic roots that are shared by all Slavic languages. In addition, Czech has been influenced over the centuries by a number of languages, especially Old Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, German, French, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian.
The spelling of loanwords was usually changed to accommodate Polish pronunciation, and various suffixes were added to create nouns, adjectives, and verbs. When borrowing international words, Polish often changed their form. For example, the Latinate suffix -tion becomes -cja in Polish, e.g., inauguration becomes inauguracja.
Here are a few common phrases and words in Polish.
Below are the Polish numerals 1-10.
Writing
Word order
The neutral word order in Polish is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are possible. Inflectional endings take care of keeping clear grammatical relations and roles in the sentence. Word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and focus (new information). Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry the most emphasis.
The spelling of loanwords was usually changed to accommodate Polish pronunciation, and various suffixes were added to create nouns, adjectives, and verbs. When borrowing international words, Polish often changed their form. For example, the Latinate suffix -tion becomes -cja in Polish, e.g., inauguration becomes inauguracja.
Here are a few common phrases and words in Polish.
Below are the Polish numerals 1-10.
The earliest written records of Polish date back to the 13th century, appearing only as individual words in Latin documents.Polish became a written language only in the 16th century. Since Poland was predominantly Roman Catholic, it was natural that the Polish alphabet was based on the Latin, rather than on the Cyrillic alphabet. Polish uses an adapted and expanded version of the Latin alphabet to this day. Since Polish has many sounds that were absent in Latin, many diacritics and combinations of letters were necessary to represent them.
Below are the letters of the modern Polish alphabet. 
Click here for more details on Polish orthography.
Take a look at article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Polish.
Click here to hear it read.
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| Article 1 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. |
As you can see, Polish orthography can be quite challenging. Just try this famous tongue-twister:
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Resources |
Click here to find out where Polish is taught in the United States. Resources for the study of Polish language and culture |
Interesting Facts
(1867-1934, a two-time Nobel laureate, was a pioneer in the early field of radiology. She was born in Warsaw, but moved to France at age 24 to pursue her education. Together with her husband, Pierre Curie, she discovered two new chemical elements. The first they named polonium after Marie's native country, and the other was named radium from its intense radioactivity.
Pope John Paul (1920-2005) II was born
in Wadowice in southern Poland. He reigned as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church for almost 27 years, from 1978 until his death, making his the second-longest pontificate. He was the first (and, only) Polish Pope and the first non-Italian Pope since the 16th century.
Lech Walęsa and the Solidarność movement
was born September 29, 1943, in Popowo, Poland. He worked as an electrician at the Gdansk shipyards, and became a trade union and human rights activist. He co-founded 
, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland from 1990 to 1995.
is a Polish trade union federation founded in September 1980 at the Gdansk shipyards, and originally led by . In the 1980s, it constituted a broad anti-communist social movement that advocated nonviolence. The survival of was an unprecedented event in the Eastern communist bloc.
 | How difficult is it to learn Polish? Polish is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. |
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