Polish is the official language of Poland.
| Spoken in: | Poland Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia (Europe), Slovakia, Ukraine, UAE, USA. |
| Total speakers: | 46 Million |
| Ranking: | 22 |
| Genetic classification: |
Indo-European Slavic West Lekhitic Polish |
| Official status | |
|---|---|
| Official language of: | Poland, also Vilnius county, Lithuania |
| ISO 639-1: | pl |
| ISO 639-2: | pol |
| SIL: | PQL |
| Table of contents |
|
2 Classification 3 Geographic distribution 4 Dialects 5 Sounds 6 Grammar 7 Vocabulary 8 Writing systems |
History
Polish has been influenced by contact with foreign languages (foremost Latin, German, French, Italian, Russian and English). In Greater Poland and especially Silesia the inimitable regional dialects are influenced by German elements. Since 1945, as the result of mass education and mass migrations, standard Polish has become far more homogeneous, although regional dialects persist. In the western and northern territories, resettled in large measure by Poles from the Soviet Union, the older generation came to speak a language characteristic of the former eastern provinces.
Classification
The Polish language, together with other Lekhitic languages (Kashubian, Polabian), Upper and Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak, belongs to the West branch of Slavic languages.
Geographic distribution
Polish is mainly spoken in Poland, but Polish emigrants have brought the language with them, and there are significant numbers of Polish speakers in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia (Europe), Slovakia, Ukraine, UAE, and the USA.
Dialects
It has several dialects that correspond in the main to the old tribal divisions; the most significant of these (in terms of numbers of speakers) are Great Polish (spoken in the northwest), Little Polish (spoken in the southeast), Mazovian (Mazur), and Silesian. Mazovian shares some features with Kashubian language, whose remaining speakers (estimates vary from 100,000 to over 200,000) live west of Gdansk near the Baltic Sea.
Small numbers of people also speak Belarusian, Ukrainian, and German as well as several varieties of Romany.
Nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected, and both noun declension and verb conjugation are highly irregular. Every verb is either perfective or imperfective.
Verbs often come in pairs, one of them imperfective and the other perfective (usually imperfective verb with a prefix), but often there are many perfective verbs with different prefixes for single imperfective words.
Tenses are:
Sounds
to do: sounds and phonology of PolishGrammar
Polish is often said to be one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. It has a complex gender system with five genders: neuter, feminine and three masculine genders (personal, animate and inanimate). There are 7 cases and 2 numbers.
| 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 of sentence, like question preposition.
Sometimes alone suffix with prefix że- appears.
So what have you done ? can be:
Writing systems
The Polish alphabet ... letters are variously decorated with diacritics and it can be represented with the ISO 8859-2 character set:
a, ą, b, c, ć, d, e, ę, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ł, m, n, ń, o, ó, p, q, r, s, ś, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, ź, ż,
A, Ą, B, C, Ć, D, E, Ę, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ł, M, N, Ń, O, Ó, P, Q, R, S, Ś, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, Ź, Ż
The letters q, v and x are used only in foreign words. It uses 9 special characters, and some character pairs to represent sounds not available in the Latin alphabet. Vowels are pronounced like in all European languages (and for that matter Japanese) other than English.
"a b d e f h k l m n o p s t u z" are pronounced as you'd expect them to be.