Polish language

Polish
język polski
Spoken in: Poland (38 million), also speakers in the United States, United Kingdom Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Lithuania, Belarus, France, Germany, Ukraine and other countries.
Total speakers: 46 million 
Ranking: 21
Language family: Indo-European
 Balto-Slavic
  Slavic
   West Slavic
    Lechitic
     Polish 
Official status
Official language of: Poland, European Union
Regulated by: Polish Language Council
Language codes
ISO 639-1: pl
ISO 639-2: pol
ISO/FDIS 639-3: pol 
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

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.

Contents

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 Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), but it is also present in other counties. In Ukraine, Polish is most often used in the Lviv and Lutsk regions. Western Belarus has an important Polish minority, especially in the Brest 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 11 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:

  1. The distinctive Góralski dialect is spoken in the mountainous areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Górale take great pride in their culture and the dialect. It has some cultural influences from the vlach shepards who migrated from Wallachia (southern Romania) in the 14th-17th centuries, as does Lemkos.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

Main article: Polish phonology

Orthography

Main article: Polish orthography
Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for a pronunciation key.

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 		Usual
phonetic value 		Other
phonetic values
A   a   [a]  
Ą Ą ą ą [ɔɰ̃] [ɔ], [ɔm], [ɔn], [ɔŋ], [ɔɲ], [ɔj̃]
B   b   [b] [p]
C   c   [ʦ] [ʣ], [ʨ]
Ć Ć ć ć [ʨ] [ʥ]
D   d   [d] [t]
E   e   [ɛ]  
Ę Ę ę ę [ɛɰ̃] [ɛ], [ɛm], [ɛn], [ɛŋ], [ɛɲ], [ɛj̃]
F   f   [f] [v]
G   g   [g] [k]
H   h   [x] [ɣ]
I   i   [i] [i̯], mute (softens preceding consonant)
J   j   [j]  
K   k   [k] [g]
L   l   [l]  
Ł Ł ł ł [w] [ɫ] in older pronunciation and eastern dialects
M   m   [m]  
N   n   [n] [ŋ], [ɲ]
Ń Ń ń ń [ɲ]  
O   o   [ɔ]  
Ó Ó ó ó [u]  
P   p   [p] [b]
R   r   [r]  
S   s   [s] [z], [ɕ]
Ś Ś ś ś [ɕ] [ʑ]
T   t   [t] [d]
U   u   [u] [u̯]
W   w   [v] [f]
Y   y   [ɨ]  
Z   z   [z] [s], [ʑ]
Ź Ź ź ź [ʑ] [ɕ]
Ż Ż ż ż [ʐ] [ʂ]

Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs:

Capitalized HTML
code 		Lower
case 		HTML
code 		Usual
phonetic value 		Other
phonetic values
Ch   ch   [x] [ɣ]
Cz   cz   [tʂ] [dʐ]
Dz   dz   [ʣ] [ʦ], [ʥ], [d-z]
Dź DŹ dź dź [ʥ] [ʨ], [d-ʑ]
Dż DŻ dż dż [dʐ] [tʂ], [d-ʐ]
Rz   rz   [ʐ] [ʂ], [r-z]
Sz   sz   [ʂ] [ʐ]

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

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

Unlike in English, the pronunciation of geminates (doubled consonants) in Polish is clearly prolonged, although it does not come to a reduction that would cause the two consonants combine into one articulation unit. The prolongation is therefore rather a repetition of the consonant. This refers both to native Polish words (like panna or oddech) as well as loan-words (lasso, attyka). Thus, panna should be pronounced pan-na, with two n. In Polish, geminates may appear in the beginning of a word - for example czczenie (worshipping), dżdżownica (earth-worm), ssak (mammalian), wwóz (importation), zstąpić (to descend; to step down), or zza (from behind; from beyond).

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. Polish has a complex gender system. The complexity of this system bases on the fact that it combines three categories - gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personality (personal versus non-personal) and vitality (animate versus inanimate), making it possible to distinguish between five genders in singular - personal masculine, animate masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, neuter and two genders in plural (personal masculine gender for human males, which is distinguished from a common plural gender for all other categories). Therefore, it is possible to detect five grammatical genders, based on the adjective-noun agreement criterium.

Gender Example – accusative singular Example – nominative plural
Adjective Noun Adjective Noun
Personal masculine nowego pracownika nowi pracownicy
Animate masculine nowego psa nowe psy
Inanimate masculine nowy stół nowe stoły
Feminine nową szafę nowe szafy
Neuter nowe krzesło nowe krzesła

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 with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. 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. In Polish, one distinguishes between three tenses (present, past and future - however, when considering the aspect of the verb, one could detect five tenses - not six, since present perfect forms do not exist in Polish), three moods (indicative, imperative and conditional) and three voices (active, passive and reflexive). Aspect is a grammatical category of the verb, and almost all Polish verbs have two distinct forms - one imperfective and one perfective. A few verbs have two imperfective forms, where the imperfective aspect subdivides into either the indeterminate and determinate aspect (chodzić - iść - pójść (to go)) or the actual and frequentative aspect (pisać - pisywać - napisać (to write)). The perfective verb form is usually an imperfective verb changed with prefixation (robić - zrobić (to make; to do)), suffixation (kichać - kichnąć (to sneeze)) or stem alternation (oddychać - odetchnąć (to breathe)). A few verbs show suppletivism in their aspect formation, like brać - wziąć (to take).

Nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected, and both noun declension and verb conjugation follow a rather complex pattern with a large amount of irregularities.

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 and all other})
  • zrobiły (they made/did {women})

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

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

  • 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 adapted in the following ways:

  1. Their spelling was usually altered to approximately keep the pronunciation, but have them written according to Polish phonetics.
  2. 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 (10th-18th century), Czech (10th and 14th-15th century), Italian (15th-16th century), French (18th-19th century), German (13-14th and 19th century, Hungarian (14th-16th century), Turkish(17th century), Old Belarusian, Ukrainian, and 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), punkt (Punkt, dot, point), 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 noticeably 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), abażur (abat-jour, lamp shade), rekin (requin, shark), meble (meuble, furniture), bagaż (bagage, luggage), 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 hill), 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.

Typical loanwords from Italian include pomidor from pomodoro (tomato), kalafior from cavolfiore (cauliflower) etc. Another interesting word of Italian origin is autostrada(from Italian "autostrada", highway).

The contacts with Ottoman Turkey in 17th century brought many new words, some of them still in use e.g. jar (deep valley), szaszłyk(sheesh kebab), filiżanka (cup), arbuz(water melon), dywan (carpet) etc.

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

Pre-war thieves' slang included such words as kimać (to sleep) or majcher (knife) of Greek origin, considered then unknown to the outside world.

Surprisingly enough, direct borrowings from Russian are extremely rare, in spite of long periods of dependence on tzarist Russia and Soviet Union, and are limited to such internationalisms as sputnik or pieriestrojka.

Brief vocabulary

Personal pronouns

Singular Plural
ja - I my - we
ty - you wy - you (Plural)
on - he
ona - she
ono - it 		oni - they (group of people, including at least one male)
one - they (group of female persons or group not involving persons)

Numbers

jeden - one dwa - two
trzy - three cztery - four
pięć - five sześć - six
siedem - seven osiem - eight
dziewięć - nine dziesięć - ten
jedenaście - eleven dwanaście - twelve
trzynaście - thirteen czternaście - fourteen
piętnaście - fifteen szesnaście - sixteen
siedemnaście - seventeen osiemnaście - eighteen
dziewiętnaście - nineteen dwadzieścia - twenty
trzydzieści - thirty czterdzieści - forty
pięćdziesiąt - fifty sześćdziesiąt - sixty
siedemdziesiąt - seventy osiemdziesiąt - eighty
dziewięćdziesiąt - ninety sto - one hundred
pięćset - five hundred tysiąc - one thousand
milion - one million miliard - one billion

Months of year

styczeń January
luty February
marzec March
kwiecień April
maj May
czerwiec June
lipiec July
sierpień August
wrzesień September
październik October
listopad November
grudzień December

Animals

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

Others

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
Wyspy Owcze Faroe Islands
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
No exact equivalent
Dzień dobry is used 		Good Afternoon
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).

See also

Dictionaries

Polish language edition of Wiktionary, the free dictionary/thesaurus

External links

Polish language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikibooks has more about this subject:
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Slavic languages
East Slavic Belarusian | Old East Slavic † | Old Novgorod dialect † | Russian | Rusyn (Carpathians) | Ruthenian † | Ukrainian
West Slavic Czech | Kashubian | Knaanic † | Lower Sorbian | Pannonian Rusyn | Polabian † | Polish | Pomeranian † | Slovak | Slovincian † | Upper Sorbian
South Slavic Banat Bulgarian | Bulgarian | Church Slavic | Macedonian | Old Church Slavic † | Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian) | Slavic (Greece) | Slovenian
Other Proto-Slavic † | Russenorsk † | Slavoserbian † | Slovio
† Extinct
Official languages of the European Union
Czech | Danish | Dutch | English | Estonian | Finnish | French
German | Greek | Hungarian | Italian | Latvian | Lithuanian | Maltese
Polish | Portuguese | Slovak | Slovenian | Spanish | Swedish
from 1/1/07 also: Bulgarian | Irish | Romanian
Source: Official EU website
nds-nl:Poolstet:Lia-polaku

   This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Polish language".