Polish phonology
The phonological system of the Polish language is similar in many ways to those of other Slavic languages, although there are some characteristic features found in only a few other languages of the family, such as contrasting postalveolar and alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates. The vowel system is relatively simple, with just six oral monophthongs and two nasals in traditional speech, while the consonant system is much more complex.
Vowels
The Polish vowel system consists of six oral sounds. Traditionally, it was also said to include two nasal monophthongs, with Polish considered the last Slavic language that had preserved nasal sounds that existed in Proto-Slavic. However, recent sources present for modern Polish a vowel system without nasal vowel phonemes, including only the aforementioned six oral vowels.OralClose
NasalNasal vowels do not feature uniform nasality over their duration. Phonetically, they consist of an oral vowel followed by a nasal semivowel or . Therefore, they are phonetically diphthongs.Phonological statusThe nasal phonemes appear in older phonological descriptions of Polish e.g.,,. In more recent descriptions the orthographic nasal vowels ą, ę are analyzed as two phonemes in all contexts e.g.,. Before a fricative and in word-final position they are transcribed as an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant or. Under such an analysis, the list of consonantal phonemes is extended by a velar nasal phoneme or by two nasal approximants,.DistributionIf analyzed as separate phonemes, nasal vowels do not occur except before a fricative and in word-final position. When the letters ą and ę appear before stops and affricates, they indicate an oral or followed by a nasal consonant homorganic with the following consonant. For example, kąt is, gęba is, pięć is and bąk is, as if they were spelled *kont, *gemba, *pieńć and *bonk. Before or, nasality is lost altogether, and ą and ę are pronounced as oral or. The sequence is also denasalized to in word-final position, as in 'I will be'.
Historical developmentDistinctive vowel length was inherited from late Proto-Slavic, although in Polish only some pretonic long vowels and vowels with the neoacute retained length. Additional vowel lengths were introduced in Proto-Polish as a result of compensatory lengthening when a yer in the next syllable disappeared according to Havlík's law. In Polish this only happened in penultimate syllables before a voiced consonant.The resultant system of vowel lengths was similar to what is today preserved in Czech and to a lesser degree in Slovak, although the distribution of the sounds often differed. In the emerging modern Polish, however, the long vowels were shortened again but sometimes with a change in quality. The latter changes came to be incorporated into the standard language only in the case of long o and the long nasal vowel. The vowel shift may thus be presented as follows:
In most circumstances, consonants were palatalized when followed by an original front vowel, including the soft yer that was often later lost. For example: *dьnь became dzień, while *dьnьmъ became dniem. Nasal vowels *ę and *ǫ of late Proto-Slavic merged to become the medieval Polish vowel, written ø. Like other Polish vowels, it developed long and short variants. The short variant developed into present-day ę, while the long form became, written ą, as described above. Overall:
Dialectal variationdiffer particularly in their realization of nasal vowels, both in terms of whether and when they are decomposed to an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant and in terms of the quality of the vowels used.Also, some dialects preserve nonstandard developments of historical long vowels ; for example, a may be pronounced with in words in which it was historically long. ConsonantsThe Polish consonant system is more complicated; its characteristic features include the series of affricates and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalisations and two further palatalisations that took place in Polish and Belarusian. |