Polish language

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{{Infobox Language |name=Polish |nativename=język polski |familycolor=Indo-European |states=Poland (38 million), also speakers in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Lithuania, Belarus, France, Germany, Ukraine and other countries. |speakers=46 million |rank=25 |fam2=Balto-Slavic |fam3=Slavic |fam4=West Slavic |fam5=Lechitic |nation=Poland, European Union |agency=Polish Language Council |iso1=pl|iso2=pol|iso3=pol}}

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 Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Czech and Slovak.

1 Classification
2 Outside influence
3 Geographic distribution
4 Dialects
5 Phonology
6 Orthography
7 Grammar
- 7.1 Word order
- 7.2 Conjugation
8 Brief vocabulary
9 Notes
10 See also
11 Dictionaries
12 External links

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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.

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Outside influence

Polish has been influenced by contact with foreign languages (mostly Latin, Czech, French, German, Italian, Old Belarusian, Russian). Recently it has been virtually bombarded by English, especially American English language elements.

Many words have been borrowed from the German language, as a result of heavy contact with neighbouring Germany. This process has been going on since medieval times. Examples include: szlachta (from German Adelsgeschlecht, nobility), 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"). This is especially true of the regional dialects of Upper Silesia.

There are also several words of French origin in the language, most likely dating from the Napoleon era, such as ekran (from French écran, screen), rekin (requin, shark), meble (meuble, furniture), bagaż (bagage, lugage), 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 cottage), 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.

A word of Italian origin is "autostrada" (from Italian "autostrada", highway).

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).

Since 1945, as a result of the mass education and mass migrations that affected several countries (particularly Poland), standard Polish has become far more homogeneous, although regional dialects persist, especially in the south in the mountaineous areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. 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.

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Geographic distribution

Polish is mainly spoken in Poland. In fact, Poland is one of the most homogenous 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 Vilniaus Apskritis (Vilnius region) (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), but it is also present in other apskritis. In Ukraine, Polish is most often used in the Lwów and Łuck regions. Western Belarus has an important Polish minority, especially in the Brześć 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, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, UAE, the UK and the United States.

In the U.S. the number of people of Polish descent is over 9 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.

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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 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, whose remaining speakers (53.000, according to 2002 Census) live around the city of Gdańsk near the Baltic Sea, predominantly to the west of the city. There are also several, now mostly extinct, regional dialects of Polish, including the Warsaw dialect.

Small numbers of people in Poland also speak Belarusian, Ukrainian, and German as well as several varieties of Romany.

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Phonology

Template:Main

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Orthography

Template:Main Template:IPA notice

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		Template:IPA
Ą	Ą	ą	ą	Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA
B		b		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
C		c		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Ć	Ć	ć	ć	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
D		d		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
E		e		Template:IPA
Ę	Ę	ę	ę	Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA
F		f		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
G		g		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
H		h		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
I		i		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, mute (softens preceding consonant)
J		j		Template:IPA
K		k		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
L		l		Template:IPA
Ł	Ł	ł	ł	Template:IPA	Template:IPA in eastern dialects
M		m		Template:IPA
N		n		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Ń	Ń	ń	ń	Template:IPA
O		o		Template:IPA
Ó	Ó	ó	ó	Template:IPA
P		p		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
R		r		Template:IPA
S		s		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Ś	Ś	ś	ś	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
T		t		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
U		u		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
W		w		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Y		y		Template:IPA
Z		z		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Ź	Ź	ź	ź	Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Ż	Ż	ż	ż	Template:IPA	Template:IPA

Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs:

Capitalized	HTML code	Lower case	HTML code	Usual phonetic value	Other phonetic values
Ch		ch		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Cz		cz		Template:IPA	Template:IPA
Dz		dz		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Dź	DŹ	dź	dź	Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Dż	DŻ	dż	dż	Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Rz		rz		Template:IPA	Template:IPA, Template:IPA
Sz		sz		Template:IPA	Template:IPA

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

Template:IPA as either h or ch
Template:IPA as either ż or rz (though rż denotes a Template:IPA cluster)
Template:IPA as either u or ó
some soft consonants as either ć, dź, ń, ś, ź, or ci, dzi, ni, si, zi

Unlike in English, doubled consonants indicate gemination, or the doubling of pronunciation time. Gemination is distinctive; for example: panna Template:IPA and pana Template:IPA; motto Template:IPA and moto Template:IPA.

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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 Russian and other Slavic languages. It has a complex gender system with five genders: neuter, feminine and three masculine genders (personal, animate and inanimate). There are seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative) and two numbers (singular and plural).

Nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected, and both noun declension and verb conjugation are highly irregular. Aspect is a grammatical category of the verb, and every verb is either imperfective or perfective, usually the imperfective form with a prefix, although there are many perfective verbs with different prefixes derived from single imperfective words, sometimes with unrelated meanings.

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, singular past perfect tense can be:

zrobił (he made/did)
zrobiła (she made/did)
zrobiło (it made/did)

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Word order

Basic word order in Polish is SVO, however 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 - Alice, not Bob, owns a cat
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.

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Conjugation

Conjugation of "iść" ("to go, walk" in the present tense):

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

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