Polish language

Polish
polski
Pronunciation	[ˈpɔlskʲi] ⓘ
Native to	Poland
Native speakers	L1: 40 million (2012)[1] L2: 670,000 (2012)[1] Total: 41 million[1]
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic West Slavic Lechitic Polish
Early forms	Old Polish Middle Polish
Dialects	Chełmnian–Kocievian–Warmian Greater Poland Lesser Poland Masovian Masurian New mixed dialects Northern Borderlands Silesian[a] Southern Borderlands Podhale Warmian
Writing system	Latin (Polish alphabet)
Signed forms	Sign Language System
Official status
Official language in	Poland European Union
Recognised minority language in	Bosnia and Herzegovina[2] Brazil[3] Czech Republic[2] Hungary[4] Lithuania[5][6] Romania[7] Slovakia[2] Ukraine[2][8]
Regulated by	Polish Language Council (of the Polish Academy of Sciences)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	pl
ISO 639-2	pol
ISO 639-3	pol
Glottolog	poli1260
Linguasphere	53-AAA-cc 53-AAA-b..-d (varieties: 53-AAA-cca to 53-AAA-ccu)
Majority of Polish speakers   Polish used together alongside other languages   Majority of Polish speakers outside of Poland
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Polish (

Historically, Polish was a lingua franca,^[25][26] important both diplomatically and academically in Central and part of Eastern Europe. In addition to being the official language of Poland, Polish is also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany, northern Czech Republic and Slovakia, western parts of Belarus and Ukraine as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia. Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II, millions of Polish speakers can also be found in countries such as Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

History

Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state.

The

The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of the Henryków monastery, noted that "Hoc est in polonico" ("This is in Polish").[30]^[31][32]

The earliest treatise on Polish orthography was written by Jakub Parkosz [pl] around 1470.^[33] The first printed book in Polish appeared in either 1508^[34] or 1513,^[35] while the oldest Polish newspaper was established in 1661.^[36] Starting in the 1520s, large numbers of books in the Polish language were published, contributing to increased homogeneity of grammar and orthography.^[37] The writing system achieved its overall form in the 16th century,^[28][38] which is also regarded as the "Golden Age of Polish literature".^[35] The orthography was modified in the 19th century and in 1936.^[28]

Tomasz Kamusella notes that "Polish is the oldest, non-ecclesiastical, written Slavic language with a continuous tradition of literacy and official use, which has lasted unbroken from the 16th century to this day."^[39] Polish evolved into the main sociolect of the nobles in Poland–Lithuania in the 15th century.^[38] The history of Polish as a language of state governance begins in the 16th century in the Kingdom of Poland. Over the later centuries, Polish served as the official language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Congress Poland, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and as the administrative language in the Russian Empire's Western Krai. The growth of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's influence gave Polish the status of lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe.^[40]

Geographic distribution

Poland is one of the most linguistically

According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England and Wales who consider Polish to be their "main" language. In Canada, there is a significant Polish Canadian population: There are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to the 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto (91,810 speakers) and Montreal.^[43]

The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the

Geographic language distribution maps of Poland from pre-WWII to present

Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939).

Knowledge of the Polish language within parts of Europe

. Polish is not a majority language of any nation outside of Poland, though areas that speak and are majority Polish are present in some neighboring countries.

The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still^[update] speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standard Polish (język ogólnopolski) appear relatively slight. Most of the middle aged and young speak vernaculars close to standard Polish, while the traditional dialects are preserved among older people in rural areas.^[44] First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty recognizing the regional and social differences. The modern standard dialect, often termed as "correct Polish",^[44] is spoken or at least understood throughout the entire country.^[19]

Polish has traditionally been described as consisting of four or five main regional dialects:

• Greater Polish, spoken in the west
• Lesser Polish, spoken in the south and southeast
• Masovian, spoken throughout the central and eastern parts of the country
• Silesian, spoken in the southwest^[a]

Many linguistic sources categorize Silesian as a dialect of Polish.[48]^[49] However, many Silesians consider themselves a separate ethnicity and have been advocating for the recognition of a Silesian language. According to the last official census in Poland in 2011, over half a million people declared Silesian as their native language. Many sociolinguists (e.g. Tomasz Kamusella,^[50] Agnieszka Pianka, Alfred F. Majewicz,^[51] Tomasz Wicherkiewicz)^[52] assume that extralinguistic criteria decide whether a lect is an independent language or a dialect: speakers of the speech variety or/and political decisions, and this is dynamic (i.e. it changes over time). Also, research organizations such as SIL International^[53] and resources for the academic field of linguistics such as Ethnologue,^[54] Linguist List^[55] and others, for example the Ministry of Administration and Digitization^[56] recognized the Silesian language. In July 2007, the Silesian language was recognized by ISO, and was attributed an ISO code of szl.

Some additional characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include:

1. The distinctive dialect of the Gorals (Góralski) occurs in the mountainous area bordering the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Gorals ("Highlanders") take great pride in their culture and the dialect. It exhibits some cultural influences from the Vlach shepherds in the 14th–17th centuries.^[57]
2. The Poznański dialect, spoken in Poznań and to some extent in the whole region of the former Prussian Partition (excluding Upper Silesia), with noticeable German influences.
3. In the northern and western (formerly German) regions where Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union resettled after World War II, the older generation speaks a dialect of Polish characteristic of the Kresy that includes a longer pronunciation of vowels.
4. Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), in Belarus (particularly the northwest), and in the northeast of Poland continue to speak the Eastern Borderlands dialect, which sounds "slushed" (in Polish described as zaciąganie z ruska, "speaking with a Ruthenian drawl") and is easily distinguishable.
5. Some city dwellers, especially the less affluent population, had their own distinctive dialects – for example, the
   Warsaw dialect, still spoken by some of the population of Praga on the eastern bank of the Vistula. However, these city dialects are now^[update]
   mostly extinct due to assimilation with standard Polish.
6. Many Poles living in emigrant communities (for example, in the United States), whose families left Poland just after World War II, retain a number of minor features of Polish vocabulary as spoken in the first half of the 20th century that now sound archaic to contemporary visitors from Poland.

Polish linguistics has been characterized by a strong strive towards promoting prescriptive ideas of language intervention and usage uniformity,^[58] along with normatively-oriented notions of language "correctness"^[44] (unusual by Western standards).^[58]

Phonology

Vowels

Polish has six oral vowels (seven oral vowels in written form), which are all monophthongs, and two nasal vowels. The oral vowels are /i/ (spelled i), /ɨ/ (spelled y and also transcribed as /ɘ/ or /ɪ/), /ɛ/ (spelled e), /a/ (spelled a), /ɔ/ (spelled o) and /u/ (spelled u and ó as separate letters). The nasal vowels are /ɛw̃/ (spelled ę) and /ɔw̃/ (spelled ą). Unlike Czech or Slovak, Polish does not retain phonemic vowel length — the letter ó, which formerly represented lengthened /ɔ/ in older forms of the language, is now vestigial and instead corresponds to /u/.

Consonants

The Polish

Most Polish words are paroxytones (that is, the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable of a polysyllabic word), although there are exceptions.

Consonant distribution

Polish permits complex consonant clusters, which historically often arose from the disappearance of

Unlike languages such as Czech, Polish does not have syllabic consonants – the nucleus of a syllable is always a vowel.^[60]

The consonant /j/ is restricted to positions adjacent to a vowel. It also cannot precede the letter y.

Prosody

The predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate stress – in a word of more than one syllable, the next-to-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress, e.g. in a four-syllable word, where the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first.^[61]

Each vowel represents one syllable, although the letter i normally does not represent a vowel when it precedes another vowel (it represents /j/, palatalization of the preceding consonant, or both depending on analysis). Also the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels when they follow another vowel, as in autor /ˈawtɔr/ ('author'), mostly in loanwords (so not in native nauka /naˈu.ka/ 'science, the act of learning', for example, nor in nativized Mateusz /maˈte.uʂ/ 'Matthew').

Some loanwords, particularly from the classical languages, have the stress on the antepenultimate (third-from-last) syllable. For example, fizyka (/ˈfizɨka/) ('physics') is stressed on the first syllable. This may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement, for example muzyka /ˈmuzɨka/ 'music' vs. muzyka /muˈzɨka/ – genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When additional syllables are added to such words through inflection or suffixation, the stress normally becomes regular. For example, uniwersytet (/uɲiˈvɛrsɨtɛt/, 'university') has irregular stress on the third (or antepenultimate) syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu (/uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛtu/) and derived adjective uniwersytecki (/uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛt͡skʲi/) have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Loanwords generally become nativized to have penultimate stress.^[62] In psycholinguistic experiments, speakers of Polish have been demonstrated to be sensitive to the distinction between regular penultimate and exceptional antepenultimate stress.^[63]

Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy, etc. These endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress; for example, zrobiłbym ('I would do') is stressed on the first syllable, and zrobilibyśmy ('we would do') on the second. According to

The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin script but includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics. The Polish alphabet was one of three major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Western and some South Slavic languages, the others being Czech orthography and Croatian orthography, the last of these being a 19th-century invention trying to make a compromise between the first two. Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, Slovak uses a Czech-based system, and Slovene follows the Croatian one; the Sorbian languages blend the Polish and the Czech ones.

Historically, Poland's once diverse and multi-ethnic population utilized many forms of scripture to write Polish. For instance,

The diacritics used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent) over the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and through the letter in ł; the kropka (superior dot) over the letter ż, and the ogonek ("little tail") under the letters ą, ę. The letters q, v, x are used only in foreign words and names.^[13]

Polish orthography is largely phonemic—there is a consistent correspondence between letters (or digraphs and trigraphs) and phonemes (for exceptions see below). The letters of the alphabet and their normal phonemic values are listed in the following table.

The following digraphs and trigraphs are used:

Voiced consonant letters frequently come to represent voiceless sounds (as shown in the tables); this occurs at the end of words and in certain clusters, due to the neutralization mentioned in the Phonology section above. Occasionally also voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds in clusters.

The spelling rule for the palatal sounds /

Digraphs and trigraphs are used:

Similar principles apply to /kʲ/, /ɡʲ/, /xʲ/ and /lʲ/, except that these can only occur before vowels, so the spellings are k, g, (c)h, l before i, and ki, gi, (c)hi, li otherwise. Most Polish speakers, however, do not consider palatalization of k, g, (c)h or l as creating new sounds.

Except in the cases mentioned above, the letter i if followed by another vowel in the same word usually represents /j/, yet a palatalization of the previous consonant is always assumed.

The reverse case, where the consonant remains unpalatalized but is followed by a palatalized consonant, is written by using j instead of i: for example, zjeść, "to eat up".

The letters ą and ę, when followed by plosives and affricates, represent an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant, rather than a nasal vowel. For example, ą in dąb ("oak") is pronounced [ɔm], and ę in tęcza ("rainbow") is pronounced [ɛn] (the nasal assimilates to the following consonant). When followed by l or ł (for example przyjęli, przyjęły), ę is pronounced as just e. When ę is at the end of the word it is often pronounced as just [ɛ].

Depending on the word, the phoneme /x/ can be spelt h or ch, the phoneme /ʐ/ can be spelt ż or rz, and /u/ can be spelt u or ó. In several cases it determines the meaning, for example: może ("maybe") and morze ("sea").

In occasional words, letters that normally form a digraph are pronounced separately. For example, rz represents /rz/, not /ʐ/, in words like zamarzać ("freeze") and in the name Tarzan.

Doubled letters are usually pronounced as a single, lengthened consonant, however, some speakers might pronounce the combination as two separate sounds.

There are certain clusters where a written consonant would not be pronounced. For example, the ł in the word jabłko ("apple") might be omitted in ordinary speech, leading to the pronunciation japko.

Grammar

Polish is a highly

Passive-type constructions can be made using the auxiliary być or zostać ("become") with the passive participle. There is also an impersonal construction where the active verb is used (in third person singular) with no subject, but with the reflexive pronoun się present to indicate a general, unspecified subject (as in pije się wódkę "vodka is being drunk"—note that wódka appears in the accusative). A similar sentence type in the past tense uses the passive participle with the ending -o, as in widziano ludzi ("people were seen"). As in other Slavic languages, there are also subjectless sentences formed using such words as można ("it is possible") together with an infinitive.

Yes–no questions (both direct and indirect) are formed by placing the word czy ("whether") at the start, although it's often omitted in casual speech. Negation uses the word nie, before the verb or other item being negated; nie is still added before the verb even if the sentence also contains other negatives such as nigdy ("never") or nic ("nothing"), effectively creating a double negative.

Polish has, over the centuries, borrowed a number of words from other languages. When borrowing, pronunciation was adapted to Polish phonemes and spelling was altered to match Polish orthography. In addition, word endings are liberally applied to almost any word to produce verbs, nouns, adjectives, as well as adding the appropriate endings for cases of nouns, adjectives, diminutives, double-diminutives, augmentatives, etc.

Depending on the historical period, borrowing has proceeded from various languages. Notable influences have been Latin (10th–18th centuries),^[68] Czech (10th and 14th–15th centuries), Italian (16th–17th centuries),^[68] French (17th–19th centuries),^[68] German (13–15th and 18th–20th centuries), Hungarian (15th–16th centuries)^[68] and Turkish (17th century). Currently, English words are the most common imports to Polish.^[69]

The Latin language, for a very long time the only official language of the Polish state, has had a great influence on Polish. Many Polish words were direct borrowings or calques (e.g. rzeczpospolita from res publica) from Latin. Latin was known to a larger or smaller degree by most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries (and it continued to be extensively taught at secondary schools until World War II). Apart from dozens of loanwords, its influence can also be seen in a number of verbatim Latin phrases in Polish literature (especially from the 19th century and earlier). During the 12th and 13th centuries, Mongolian words were brought to the Polish language during wars with the armies of Genghis Khan and his descendants, e.g. dzida (spear) and szereg (a line or row).^[69]

Words from Czech, an important influence during the 10th and 14th–15th centuries include sejm, hańba and brama.^[69]

In 1518, the Polish king

In the 18th century, with the rising prominence of France in Europe, French supplanted Latin as an important source of words. Some French borrowings also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Poles were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon. Examples include ekran (from French "écran", screen), abażur ("abat-jour", lamp shade), rekin ("requin", shark), meble ("meuble", furniture), bagaż ("bagage", luggage), walizka ("valise", suitcase), fotel ("fauteuil", armchair), plaża ("plage", beach) and koszmar ("cauchemar", nightmare). Some place names have also been adapted from French, such as the Warsaw borough of Żoliborz ("joli bord" = beautiful riverside), as well as the town of Żyrardów (from the name Girard, with the Polish suffix -ów attached to refer to the founder of the town).^[71]

Many words were borrowed from the

The mountain dialects of the Górale in southern Poland, have quite a number of words borrowed from Hungarian (e.g. baca, gazda, juhas, hejnał) and Romanian as a result of historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians.^[76]

Thieves' slang includes such words as kimać (to sleep) or majcher (knife) of Greek origin, considered then unknown to the outside world.^[77]

In addition, Turkish and Tatar have exerted influence upon the vocabulary of war, names of oriental costumes etc.^[68] Russian borrowings began to make their way into Polish from the second half of the 19th century on.^[68]

Polish has also received an intensive number of English loanwords, particularly after World War II.^[68] Recent loanwords come primarily from the English language, mainly those that have Latin or Greek roots, for example komputer (computer), korupcja (from 'corruption', but sense restricted to 'bribery') etc. Concatenation of parts of words (e.g. auto-moto), which is not native to Polish but common in English, for example, is also sometimes used. When borrowing English words, Polish often changes their spelling. For example, Latin suffix '-tio' corresponds to -cja. To make the word plural, -cja becomes -cje. Examples of this include inauguracja (inauguration), dewastacja (devastation), recepcja (reception), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (connotations). Also, the digraph qu becomes kw (kwadrant = quadrant; kworum = quorum).

Loanwords from Polish in other languages

There are a substantial number of Polish words which officially became part of Yiddish, once the main language of European Jews. These include basic items, objects or terms such as a bread bun (Polish bułka, Yiddish בולקע bulke), a fishing rod (wędka, ווענטקע ventke), an oak (dąb, דעמב demb), a meadow (łąka, לאָנקע lonke), a moustache (wąsy, וואָנצעס vontses) and a bladder (pęcherz, פּענכער penkher).^[82]

Quite a few culinary loanwords exist in German and in other languages, some of which describe distinctive features of Polish cuisine. These include German and English Quark from twaróg (a kind of fresh cheese) and German Gurke, English gherkin from ogórek (cucumber). The word pierogi (Polish dumplings) has spread internationally, as well as pączki (Polish donuts)^[83] and kiełbasa (sausage, e.g. kolbaso in Esperanto). As far as pierogi concerned, the original Polish word is already in plural (sing. pieróg, plural pierogi; stem pierog-, plural ending -i; NB. o becomes ó in a closed syllable, like here in singular), yet it is commonly used with the English plural ending -s in Canada and United States of America, pierogis, thus making it a "double plural". A similar situation happened with the Polish loanword from English czipsy ("potato chips")—from English chips being already plural in the original (chip + -s), yet it has obtained the Polish plural ending -y^[b].

It is believed that the English word spruce was derived from Prusy, the Polish name for the region of Prussia. It became spruce because in Polish, z Prus, sounded like "spruce" in English (transl. "from Prussia") and was a generic term for commodities brought to England by Hanseatic merchants and because the tree was believed to have come from Polish Ducal Prussia.^[84] However, it can be argued that the word is actually derived from the Old French term Pruce, meaning literally Prussia.^[84]

Literature

The Polish language started to be used in literature in the Late

In the Romantic Era, the most celebrated national poets, referred to as the Three Bards, were Adam Mickiewicz (Pan Tadeusz and Dziady), Juliusz Słowacki (Balladyna) and Zygmunt Krasiński (The Undivine Comedy). Poet and dramatist Cyprian Norwid is regarded by some scholars as the "Fourth Bard". Important positivist writers include Bolesław Prus (The Doll, Pharaoh), Henryk Sienkiewicz (author of numerous historical novels the most internationally acclaimed of which is Quo Vadis), Maria Konopnicka (Rota), Eliza Orzeszkowa (Nad Niemnem), Adam Asnyk and Gabriela Zapolska (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska). The period known as Young Poland produced such renowned literary figures as Stanisław Wyspiański (The Wedding), Stefan Żeromski (Homeless People, The Spring to Come), Władysław Reymont (The Peasants) and Leopold Staff. The prominent interbellum period authors include Maria Dąbrowska (Nights and Days), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Insatiability), Julian Tuwim, Bruno Schulz, Bolesław Leśmian, Witold Gombrowicz and Zuzanna Ginczanka.

Other notable writers and poets from Poland active during World War II and after are Aleksander Kamiński, Zbigniew Herbert, Stanisław Lem, Zofia Nałkowska, Tadeusz Borowski, Sławomir Mrożek, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Julia Hartwig, Marek Krajewski, Joanna Bator, Andrzej Sapkowski, Adam Zagajewski, Dorota Masłowska, Jerzy Pilch, Ryszard Kapuściński and Andrzej Stasiuk.

Five people writing in the Polish language have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Władysław Reymont (1924), Czesław Miłosz (1980), Wisława Szymborska (1996) and Olga Tokarczuk (2018).

Sample text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Polish:^[85]

Wszyscy ludzie rodzą się wolni i równi pod względem swej godności i swych praw. Są oni obdarzeni rozumem i sumieniem i powinni postępować wobec innych w duchu braterstwa.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:^[86]

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.

See also

• Polonism (words of Polish origin)
• Adam Mickiewicz Institute
• A Translation Guide to 19th-Century Polish-Language Civil-Registration Documents
• BABEL Speech Corpus
• Holy Cross Sermons
• Lechitic languages
• University of Łódź School of Polish for Foreigners
• West Slavic languages
• West Slavs

Notes

References

Further reading

• Bisko, Wacław (1966). Mówimy po polsku. A beginner's course of Polish (DTBook). translated and adapted by Stanisław Kryński. Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna (pl).
• Gussmann, Edmund (2007). The Phonology of Polish.
  OCLC 320907619
  .
• Sadowska, Iwona (2012). Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar.
  ISBN 978-0-415-47541-9
  .
• Swan, Oscar E. (2002). A Grammar of Contemporary Polish. Bloomington, IN: Slavica.
  ISBN 0-89357-296-9
  .

External links

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (March 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

• The Polish Language: A Cheatsheet for Beginners from Culture.pl
• Podręczniki języka polskiego dla obcokrajowców Archived 2021-10-23 at the Wayback Machine
• Basic Polish Phrases
• Basic Polish Phrases Audio Course
• Polish Pronunciation Audio and Grammar Charts
• King's College London: Polish Language Resources Archived 2014-12-05 at the Wayback Machine
• University of Pittsburgh: Polish Language Website
• "A Touch of Polish", BBC
• A Concise Polish Grammar, by Ronald F. Feldstein (110-page 600-KB pdf)
• Oscar Swan's Electronic Polish-English, English-Polish dictionary
• English-Polish Online Dictionary
• Basic English-Polish Dictionary
• Big English-Polish Dictionary with example sentences from translation memories
• Polish Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix
• Learn Polish Archived 2021-02-25 at the Wayback Machine—List of Online Polish Courses
• Polish English wordlist, 600 terms Archived 2013-10-08 at the Wayback Machine
• A taste of the linguistic diversity of contemporary Poland from Culture.pl
• KELLY Project word list 9000 most useful words for learners of Polish
• Dictionaries24.com Online dictionary with English-Polish and Polish-English translations
• 'Polszczyzna' & the Revolutionary Feminine Suffix from Culture.pl
• Głagolicy, a way to write Polish with the Glagolitic script