Polish language

Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland. Polish is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.

Polish was once a lingua franca in various regions of Central and Eastern Europe, mostly due to the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although no longer having as great an influence outside of Poland, due in part to the dominance of the Russian language, it is still sometimes spoken or at least understood in western border areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as a second language. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

Classification

The Polish language is the most widely-spoken of the Slavic language subgroup of the Lechitic languages which include Kashubian (the only surviving dialect of the Pomeranian language) and the extinct Polabian language. The three languages, along with Upper and Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak, belong to the West branch of Slavic languages.

Geographic distribution

Polish is mainly spoken in Poland. In fact, Poland is one of the most homogeneous European countries in terms of its mother tongue, as close to 97% of Polish citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. After the Second World War the previously Polish territories annexed by the USSR retained a large amount of the Polish population that was unwilling or unable to migrate toward the post-1945 Poland and even today ethnic Poles in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine constitute large minorities. In Lithuania 9 percent of the population declared Polish to be their mother tongue. It is by far the most widely used minority language in the Vilniaus Apskritis (Vilnius region) (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), but it is also present in other apskritis. In Ukraine, Polish is most often used in the Lwów and Łuck regions. Western Belarus has an important Polish minority, especially in the Brześć and Grodno regions.

There are also significant numbers of Polish speakers in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, UAE, the UK and the United States.

In the U.S. the number of people of Polish descent is over 9 million, see: Polish language in the United States, but most of them do not use Polish in their everyday communications.

According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English or 0.25% of the U.S. population.

Dialects

Polish became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, partly due to universal education, but also because of the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the east was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, during World War II.

"Standard" Polish is still spoken somewhat differently in different regions of the country, although the differences between these broad "dialects" are slight. There is never any difficulty in mutual understanding, and non-native speakers are generally unable to distinguish them without conscious effort. That is, these differences are slight compared to different dialects of English, for example. The regional differences correspond mainly to old tribal divisions from around 1000 years ago; the most significant of these (in terms of numbers of speakers) are Great Polish (spoken in the west), Lesser Polish (spoken in the south and southeast), Mazovian (Mazur) spoken throughout the centre and east of the country, and Silesian spoken in the southwest. Mazovian shares some features with the Kashubian language (see below),

Some more characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include:

The distinctive Góralski dialect is spoken in the mountaineous areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Górale take great pride in their culture and the dialect.
In the western and northern regions that were largely resettled by Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union, the older generation speaks a dialect of Polish characteristic of the former eastern provinces (the Kresy).
The Kashubian language, spoken in the Pomorze region west of Gdańsk on the Baltic sea is closely related to Polish, and was once considered a dialect by some. However, the differences are large enough to merit its classification as a separate language (for instance, it is not readily understandable to Polish speakers unless written, and contains many loanwords from German.) There were about 53 000 speakers according to the 2002 census)
Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), Belarus (particularly the northwest), and in the north-east of Poland continue to speak the eastern (Kresy) dialect which is said to be much more "musical" than standard Polish.
Some city dwellers (especially the less affluent population) had their own distinctive dialects. An example of this is the Warsaw dialect, still spoken by some of the population of Praga, on the eastern bank of the Vistula. (Praga was the only part of the city whose population survived World War II somewhat intact). However, these city dialects are now mostly extinct due to assimilation with standard Polish.
Many Poles living in immigrant communities, e.g. in the USA, who arrived there just after World War II, or whose parents arrived then, retain many small features of Polish vocabulary as it was spoken in the first half of the 20th century, but which appear unusual to contemporary visitors from Poland.

Phonology

Orthography

The Polish alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as kreska (graphically similar to acute accent), superior dot and ogonek.

Upper case	HTML code	Lower case	HTML code	Other phonetic values
A		a
Ą	Ą	ą	ą	, , , , ,
B		b
C		c		,
Ć	Ć	ć	ć
D		d
E		e
Ę	Ę	ę	ę	, , , , ,
F		f
G		g
H		h
I		i		, mute (softens preceding consonant)
J		j
K		k
L		l
Ł	Ł	ł	ł	in older pronunciation and eastern dialects
M		m
N		n		,
Ń	Ń	ń	ń
O		o
Ó	Ó	ó	ó
P		p
R		r
S		s		,
Ś	Ś	ś	ś
T		t
U		u
W		w
Y		y
Z		z		,
Ź	Ź	ź	ź
Ż	Ż	ż	ż

Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs:

Capitalized	HTML code	Lower case	HTML code	Other phonetic values
Ch		ch
Cz		cz
Dz		dz		, ,
Dź	DŹ	dź	dź	,
Dż	DŻ	dż	dż	,
Rz		rz		,
Sz		sz

Note that although the Polish orthography is mostly phonetic, some sounds may be written in more than one way:

as either h or ch
as either ż or rz (though rż denotes a cluster)
as either u or ó
some soft consonants as either ć, dź, ń, ś, ź, or ci, dzi, ni, si, zi

Unlike in English, doubled consonants indicate gemination, or the doubling of pronunciation time. Gemination is distinctive; for example: panna and pana ; motto and moto .

Grammar

Polish is often said to be one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn; of course, this depends on one's native language. While difficult for English speakers, it is relatively easy for speakers of other Slavic languages. It has a gender system with three genders in singular (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two in plural (personal masculine gender for human males, which is distinguished from a common plural gender for all other categories). There are seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative) and two numbers (singular and plural).

Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system: six cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, plus a seventh case for direct address, the vocative for nouns and pronouns (very often replaced by nominative). 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. Aspect is a grammatical category of the verb, and every verb is either imperfective or perfective, usually the imperfective form with a prefix, although there are many perfective verbs with different prefixes derived from single imperfective words, sometimes with unrelated meanings.

Nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected, and both noun declension and verb conjugation follow a rather complex pattern; while some are irregular.

The tenses include:

construction	(for perfective verbs)	(for imperfective verbs)	example imperfective	example perfective
verb+ić	infinitive	infinitive	robić	zrobić
verb+suffix	future simple tense	present tense	robicie	zrobicie
past participle+suffix	past perfect tense	past imperfect tense	robiliście	zrobiliście
(this suffix can be moved)			coście robili	coście zrobili

Movable suffix is usually attached to verb or to the most accented word of sentence, like question preposition.

Sometimes the sentence may be emphasised with a particle -że- (-ż).

So what have you done ? can be:

Co zrobiliście?
Coście zrobili?
Cóżeście zrobili? (a form that could be derived from Cóż zrobiliście? which actually sounds archaic and is not used, except for eg. biblical usage)

All the above examples show inflected forms of the verb "zrobić" for the subject "you" informal plural ("wy"). However, it is of note that none of the above examples include the subject itself. The inclusion of the subject is not necessary here because Polish is a pro-drop language. This means that a subject does not need to be used with an inflected verb. Instead, the reader or listener can tell which subject is implied through the type ending on the verb, which is different for each person, singular and plural. Because the subject can be dropped, using it with an inflected verb signals emphasis. Of the above three examples, a native speaker would not include the subject in the middle sentence and would be unlikely to include a subject in the last one. The below examples show how the subject could be included in such sentences, where possible:

Co wy zrobiliście?
Coście zrobili? (a native speaker would not use a subject here)
Co wyście zrobili? (this example emphasizes the pronoun -- "wy"+ście)
Co żeście zrobili? (this example emphasizes the że- particle, but it is not correct in a written form)

The past participle depends on number and gender, so third person, past perfect tense can be:

- singular
zrobił (he made/did)
zrobiła (she made/did)
zrobiło (it made/did)
- plural
zrobili (they made/did {men})
zrobiły (they made/did {all other})

Word order

Basic word order in Polish is SVO, however, since it is a morpheme rich language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context.

These sentences mean more or less the same ("Alice has a cat"), but different shades of meaning are emphasized by selecting another word order. In increasing order of sophistication:

Ala ma kota - Alice has a cat
Ala kota ma - Alice does have (own) a cat (and has not borrowed it)
Kota ma Ala - The/a cat is owned by Alice
Ma Ala kota - Alice really does have a cat
Kota Ala ma - It is just the cat that Alice really has
Ma kota Ala - The relationship of Alice to the cat is one of ownership (and not temporary possession)

However, only the first three examples sound natural in Polish, and others should be used for special emphasis only, if at all.

If a question mark is added to the end of those sentences they will all mean "does Alice have a cat?"; an optional 'czy' could be added to the beginning (but native speakers do not always use it).

If apparent from context, you can drop the subject, object or even the verb:

Ma kota - can be used if it is obvious who is the person talked about
Ma - short answer for "Czy Ala ma kota?" (as in "Yes, she does")
Ala - answer for "Kto ma kota?" (as in "Alice does")
Kota - answer for "Co ma Ala?" (as in "The cat")
Ala ma - answer for "Kto z naszych znajomych ma kota?" (as in "Alice does (have one)")

Note the marker "czy" which is used to start a yes/no question, much like the French "est-ce que".

There is a tendency in Polish to drop the subject rather than the object and you rarely know the object but not the subject. If the question was "Kto ma kota?" (who has a cat?), the answer should be "Ala" alone, without a verb.

In particular, "ja" (I) and "ty" (you, singular), and also their plural equivalents "my" (we) and "wy" (you, plural), are almost always dropped, much like the respective Spanish pronouns.

Conjugation

Conjugation of "iść" ("to go, walk" in the present tense):

Ja idę – I am walking
Ty idziesz – You are walking
On/ona/ono idzie – He/she/it is walking
My idziemy – We are walking
Wy idziecie – You are walking (Plural)
Oni/one idą – They are walking ("Oni" masculine personal, "one" feminine, neuter, masculine animate or masculine inanimate)

In Polish it's not necessary to insert person. You can just:

Idę
Idziesz
Idzie
Idziemy
Idziecie
Idą

Borrowed words

Polish has, over the centuries, borrowed a large number of words from other languages. Borrowed words have been usually rapidly "domesticated" in the following ways:

Their spelling was usually altered to approximately keep the pronunciation, but have them written according to Polish phonetics.
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, diminutives, augmentatives, etc.

Depending on the historical period, borrowing has proceeded from various languages. Recent borrowing is primarily of "international" words from the English language that tend to have Latin or Greek roots. For example komputer (computer), biznes (business), produkcja (production), korupcja (corruption) etc. Slang sometimes borrows and alters common English words, e.g. luknąć (to look), but these borrowings are usually short lived, going out of fashion after several years. Concatenation of parts of words (e.g. auto-moto), which is not native to Polish but common in e.g. English is sometimes used.

When borrowing international words, Polish often changes their spelling. For example, the Latinate suffix that is spelled '-tion' in English, corresponds to -cja. To make the word plural, -cja becomes -cje. Examples of this include inauguracja (inauguration), dewastacja (devastation), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (connotations). Also, the digraph qu becomes kw (kwadrant=quadrant; kworum=quorum).

Other notable influences in the past have been Latin (16th-18th century), Czech (10th and 14th-15th century), French (18th-19th century), German, Italian (15th-16th century), Old Belarusian, Ukrainian), Russian).

Many words have been borrowed from the German language, as a result of being neighbours for a millennium, and also due to a sizeable German population in Polish cities in medieval times. Examples include: szlachta (from German Adelsgeschlecht, nobility), rachunek (Rechnung, bill/invoice), ratusz (Rathaus, town hall), burmistrz (Bürgermeister, mayor (of a town)), handel (Handel, commerce), kac (Katze/Kater, hangover), kelner (Kellner, waiter) and malarz (Maler, painter; also, the word malować has entered Polish as the verb "to paint"). The regional dialects of Upper Silesia and Masuria (former East Prussia) have noticebly more German loanwords than other dialects.

Latin was a language known to a larger or smaller degree by most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries. Its influence can still be seen somewhat by the greater number of verbatim Latin phrases in Polish literature (especially from the 19th century and earlier), than, say, in English.

In the 18th century French supplanted Latin in this respect, along with France's rising prominence in Europe at this time. Some words also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Poles were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon. Examples include ekran (from French écran, screen), rekin (requin, shark), meble (meuble, furniture), bagaż (bagage, lugage), fotel (fauteuil, armchair), plaża (plage, beach) and koszmar (cauchemar, nightmare). Some place names have also been adapted from French, such as the two Warsaw boroughs of Żoliborz (joli bord=beautiful riverside) and Mokotów (mon coteau=my cottage), as well as the suburb of Żyrardów (from the name Girard, with the Polish suffix -ów attached to form the town's name).

Other words are borrowed from other Slavic languages, for example, sejm, hańba and brama from Czech.

Some words like bachor (an unruly boy or child) and ciuchy (slang for clothing) were borrowed from Yiddish, spoken by the large Polish jewish population before their numbers were severely depleted during the Holocaust.

An interesting word of Italian origin is "autostrada" (from Italian "autostrada", highway).

The mountain dialects of the Gorale in southern Poland, have quite a number of words borrowed from Hungarian (e.g. Baca) and Romanian from historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians.

Brief vocabulary

Singular:
ja - I
ty - you
on - he
ona - she
ono - it

Plural:
my - we
wy - you (Plural)
oni - they (group of people, including at least one male)
one - they (group of female persons or group not involving persons)

słoń - elephant
kot - cat
pies - dog
krowa - cow
wilk - wolf
świnia - pig
mucha - fly
osa - wasp
pszczoła - bee
niedźwiedź - bear
rekin - shark

drzewo - tree
kwiat - flower

dzień - day
miesiąc - month
rok - year

Anglia - England
Szkocja - Scotland
Walia - Wales
Irlandia - Ireland
Wielka Brytania - Great Britain
Zjednoczone Królestwo - United Kingdom

Niemcy - Germany
Słowacja - Slovakia
Norwegia - Norway
Dania - Denmark
Belgia - Belgium
Japonia - Japan
Stany Zjednoczone Ameryki - The United States of America
Francja - France
Hiszpania - Spain
Portugalia - Portugal
Monako - Monaco
Włochy - Italy
Słowenia - Slovenia
Europa - Europe
Wenezuela - Venezuela

Polska - Poland
Polak (m)/ Polka (f) - Pole
polski - Polish

Cześć - Hi
Dzień dobry - Good day (There is not "good morning" and "good afternoon" in Polish, only "good day")
Do widzenia - Good bye
Do zobaczenia - See you
Dobry wieczór - Good evening
Dobranoc - Good night

Notes

¹ You can hear the voice samples by clicking on the Polish example (ogg format).

Dictionaries

Polish Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary

External links