Polish alphabet

[Image:Polish-alphabet.png|thumb|class=skin-invert-image|The Polish alphabet. Grey indicates letters not used in native words (Q, V, and X).]
The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters with diacritics: the stroke – kreska: ; the overdot – kropka: ; and the tail or ogonek –. The letters,, and, which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. Additionally, before the standardization of Polish spelling, was sometimes used in place of, and in place of.
Modified variations of the Polish alphabet are used for writing Silesian and Kashubian, whereas the Sorbian languages use a mixture of Polish and Czech orthography.

Letters

There are 32 letters in the Polish alphabet: 9 vowels and 23 consonants.
,, and are not used in any native Polish words and are mostly found in foreign words and commercial names. In loanwords they are usually replaced by,, and, respectively, although some loanwords retain their original spelling, and in a few cases both spellings are accepted. In addition, they can occasionally be found in common abbreviations. As a result, they are sometimes included in the Polish alphabet ; when included, they take their usual positions from the Latin alphabet.
The following table lists the letters of the alphabet, their Polish names, the Polish spelling alphabet name, the Polish phonemes which they usually represent, other possible pronunciations, and letter frequencies. Diacritics are shown for the sake of clarity. For more information about the sounds, see Polish phonology.

Upper case	Lower case	Polish name	Usual value	Rough English equivalent	Other values
A	a	a		large	More frontal between palatal or palatalized consonants
Ą	ą	ą		nasal o, as French bon	,, ; becomes before
B	b'	be		bed	when devoiced
C	c	ce		pits	if voiced. For ch, ci, cz see Digraphs
Ć	ć	cie		cheap	if voiced
D	d	de		dog	before ; when devoiced; before. For dz etc. see Digraphs
E	e	e		bed	between palatal or palatalized consonants
Ę	ę	ę		nasal e, as French cinq	,, ; becomes word-finally and before
F	f'	ef		fingers	if voiced
G	g	gie		go	when devoiced. For gi see Digraphs
H	h	ha		Scots loch	if voiced, may be glottal in a small number of dialects. For ch and hi see Digraphs
I	i	i		meet	before a consonant; marks palatization of the preceding consonant before a vowel
J	j	jot		yes
K	k	ka		king	if voiced. For ki see Digraphs
L	l	el		light	May be instead in eastern dialects
Ł	ł	eł		will	May be instead in eastern dialects
M	m	em		men	before labiodental consonants
N	n	en		not	before ; can be before. For ni see Digraphs
Ń	ń	eń		canyon	Can be in syllable coda
O	o	o		long	between palatal or palatalized consonants
Ó	ó	ó, o z kreską, o kreskowane or u zamknięte		boot	between palatal or palatalized consonants
P	p	pe		spot	if voiced
		ku		question	Only in some traditional loanwords as quasi- and recent as quad, quiz.
R	r	er		American English butter	Can also sometimes be an approximant, a fricative, and – rarely – a trill. See Polish phonology. For rz see Digraphs
S	s	es		sea	For sz, si see Digraphs
Ś	ś	eś		sheep	if voiced
T	t	te		start	before ; if voiced; before.
U	u	u, u zwykłe or u otwarte		boot	between palatal or palatalized consonants, sometimes after vowels
		fał		vow	Only in some traditional loanwords as varsaviana, vel, vide, recent as van, Vanuatu, vlog, some acronyms as TVP, VAT and in artistic forms, as vlepka, seldom as in German borrowings as volkslista and as a Roman numeral 5.
W	w	wu		vow	when devoiced
		iks	/ks/	fox	Only in some loanwords as xenia, also historical letter for native words prior to 19th century, e.g., xiążę, xięstwo, which remains in abbreviations of these words, some names, as Xymena, Xawery, surnames as Xiężopolski, Axentowicz, Axer, names of some companies in Poland with -ex suffix and as a Roman numeral 10.
Y	y	igrek		bit
Z	z	zet		zoo	when devoiced. For digraphs see Digraphs
Ź	ź	ziet		vision	when devoiced. For dź see Digraphs
Ż	ż	żet or zet z kropką		vision	when devoiced. For dż see Digraphs

was historically used in native words prior to the 1891 spelling reform by the Academy of Learning, e.g., cztéry, papiéż. Now it is used in some loanwords, e.g., attaché, exposé, chargé d’affaires.
For digraphs and other rules about spelling and the corresponding pronunciations, see Polish orthography.

Names of letters

The spoken Polish names of the letters are given in the table under Letters above.
The names of the letters are not normally written out in the way shown above, except as part of certain lexicalized abbreviations, such as Pekao, the name of a bank, which represents the spoken form of the abbreviation P.K.O..
Some letters may be referred to in alternative ways, often consisting of just the sound of the letter. For example, may be called as it is pronounced: y rather than igrek.
When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters. For example, may be referred to as samo ha to distinguish it from . may be called żet z kropką or zet z kropką to distinguish it from . may be called u otwarte or u zwykłe to distinguish it from, which is sometimes called u zamknięte or ó kreskowane, o kreskowane, o z kreską.

Alphabetical order

Polish alphabetical ordering uses the order of letters as in the table under Letters above.
Note that Polish letters with diacritics are treated as fully independent letters in alphabetical ordering. For example, być comes after bycie. The accented letters also have their own sections in dictionaries.
Digraphs are not given any special treatment in alphabetical ordering. For example, is treated simply as followed by and not as a single letter as in Czech.

Computer encoding

There are several systems for encoding the Polish alphabet for computers. All letters of the Polish alphabet are included in Unicode, and thus Unicode-based encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 can be used. The Polish alphabet is completely included in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is ISO 8859-2, although both ISO 8859-13 and ISO 8859-16 encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is Windows-1250.
The Polish letters which are not present in the English alphabet have the following HTML codes and Unicode codepoints:

Upper case	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż
HTML entity	Ą &Aogon;	Ć &Cacute;	Ę &Eogon;	Ł &Lstrok;	Ń &Nacute;	Ó Ó	Ś &Sacute;	Ź &Zacute;	Ż &Zdot;
Unicode	U+0104	U+0106	U+0118	U+0141	U+0143	U+00D3	U+015A	U+0179	U+017B
TexPL	129	130	134	138	139	211	145	153	155
Result	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż

Lower case	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó	ś	ź	ż
HTML entity	ą &aogon;	ć &cacute;	ę &eogon;	ł &lstrok;	ń &nacute;	ó ó	ś &sacute;	ź &zacute;	ż &zdot;
Unicode	U+0105	U+0107	U+0119	U+0142	U+0144	U+00F3	U+015B	U+017A	U+017C
TexPL	161	162	166	170	171	243	145	177	185
Result	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó	ś	ź	ż

For other encodings, see Polish code pages, but also Combining Diacritical Marks Unicode block.
A common test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters is the nonsensical Zażółć gęślą jaźń.