Polish language
Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic subgroup, within the Indo-European language family, and is written in the Latin script. It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth-most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects. It maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals.
The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three. Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and nine written vowels, including two nasal vowels denoted by a reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek. Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases. It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants. Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish and Middle Polish.
Among the major languages, it is most closely related to Slovak and Czech but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar. In addition, Polish was profoundly influenced by Latin and other Romance languages like Italian and French as well as Germanic languages, which contributed a large number of loanwords and similar grammatical structures. Extensive usage of nonstandard dialects has also shaped the standard language; many colloquialisms and expressions were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish and subsequently adopted into the vernacular of Polish in everyday use.
Historically, Polish was a lingua franca, 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. At the time, it was a collection of dialect groups with some mutual features, but much regional variation was present. Mieszko I, ruler of the Polans tribe from the Greater Poland region, united a few culturally and linguistically related tribes from the basins of the Vistula and Oder before eventually accepting baptism in 966. With the arrival of Western Christianity, Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet, which made it possible to write down Polish, which until then had existed only as a spoken language. The closest relatives of Polish are the Elbe and Baltic Sea Lechitic dialects. All of them, except Kashubian, are extinct. The precursor to modern Polish is the Old Polish language. Ultimately, Polish descends from the unattested Proto-Slavic language.File:Book of Henryków.PNG|thumb|left|The Book of Henryków is the earliest document to include a sentence written entirely in what can be interpreted as Old Polish – Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai, meaning "let me grind, and you have a rest" highlighted in red.
The Book of Henryków, contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai, written around 1280. The book is exhibited in the Archdiocesal Museum in Wrocław, and as of 2015 has been added to UNESCO's "Memory of the World" list.
The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of the Henryków monastery, noted that "Hoc est in polonico".
The earliest treatise on Polish orthography was written by around 1470. The first printed book in Polish appeared in either 1508 or 1513, while the oldest Polish newspaper was established in 1661. Starting in the 1520s, large numbers of books in the Polish language were published, contributing to increased homogeneity of grammar and orthography. The writing system achieved its overall form in the 16th century, which is also regarded as the "Golden Age of Polish literature". The orthography was modified in the 19th century and in 1936.
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." Polish evolved into the main sociolect of the nobles in Poland–Lithuania in the 15th century. 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.
The process of standardization began in the 14th century and solidified in the 16th century during the Middle Polish era. Standard Polish was based on various dialectal features, with the Greater Poland dialect group serving as the base. After World War II, Standard Polish became the most widely spoken variant of Polish across the country, and most dialects stopped being the form of Polish spoken in villages.
Geographic distribution
Poland is one of the most linguistically homogeneous European countries; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their first language. Elsewhere, Poles constitute large minorities in areas which were once administered or occupied by Poland, notably in neighboring Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County, by 26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results, as Vilnius was part of Poland from 1922 until 1939. Polish is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania. In Ukraine, it is most common in the western parts of Lviv and Volyn Oblasts, while in West Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border. There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries.In the United States, Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. According to the 2000 United States census, 667,414 Americans of age five years and over reported Polish as the language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English, 0.25% of the US population, and 6% of the Polish-American population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census were found in three states: Illinois, , and New Jersey. Enough people in these areas speak Polish that PNC Financial Services offers services available in Polish at all of their cash machines in addition to English and Spanish.
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; in particular, there are concentrations of Polish speakers in Toronto and Montreal.
The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II and Polish population transfers. Poles settled in the "Recovered Territories" in the west and north, which had previously been mostly German-speaking. Some Poles remained in the previously Polish-ruled territories in the east that were annexed by the USSR, resulting in the present-day Polish-speaking communities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, although many Poles were expelled from those areas to areas within Poland's new borders. To the east of Poland, the most significant Polish minority lives in a long strip along either side of the Lithuania-Belarus border. Meanwhile, the flight and expulsion of Germans, as well as the expulsion of Ukrainians and Operation Vistula, the 1947 migration of Ukrainian minorities in the Recovered Territories in the west of the country, contributed to the country's linguistic homogeneity.
Dialects
The inhabitants of different regions of Poland speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standard Polish 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. 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", is spoken or at least understood throughout the entire country.Polish has traditionally been described as consisting of three to 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
Kashubian contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels and phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages. However, it was described by some linguists as lacking most of the linguistic and social determinants of language-hood.
Many linguistic sources categorize Silesian as a regional language separate from Polish, while some consider Silesian to be a dialect of Polish. Many Silesians consider themselves a separate ethnicity and have been advocating for the recognition of Silesian as a regional language in Poland. The law recognizing it as such was passed by the Sejm and Senate in April 2024, but was vetoed by President Andrzej Duda in late May 2024.
According to the last official census in Poland in 2011, over half a million people declared Silesian as their native language. Many sociolinguists 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. Also, research organizations such as SIL International and resources for the academic field of linguistics such as Ethnologue, Linguist List and others, for example the Ministry of Administration and Digitization 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:
- The distinctive dialect of the Gorals occurs in the mountainous area bordering the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Gorals take great pride in their culture and the dialect. It exhibits some cultural influences from the Vlach shepherds in the 14th–17th centuries.
- The Poznański dialect, spoken in Poznań and to some extent in the whole region of the former Prussian Partition, with noticeable German influences.
- In the northern and western 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.
- Poles living in Lithuania, in Belarus, and in the northeast of Poland continue to speak the Eastern Borderlands dialect, which sounds "slushed" and is easily distinguishable.
- 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 mostly extinct due to assimilation with standard Polish.
- Many Poles living in emigrant communities, 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.