Polish language
Contents |
Regulated by Polish Language Council
Language codes
ISO 639-1 pl
ISO 639-2 pol
ISO 639-3 pol
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Polish (Język polski, polszczyzna) is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner throughout most of Poland.
Despite the pressure of non-Polish administrations in Poland, who have often attempted to suppress the Polish language, a rich literature has developed over the centuries and the language is currently the largest in terms of speakers of the West Slavic group. It is also the third most widely spoken Slavic language, after Russian and Ukrainian.
Geographic distribution
Nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their mother language. Ethnic Poles constitute significant minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), and it is also present in other counties. In Ukraine, Polish can often be heard in the cities of Lviv and Lutsk. Western Belarus has a significant Polish minority, particularly in the Brest and Grodno regions.
Polish speakers also live in: Argentina, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, China (Harbin), Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Peru, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine, UAE, the UK, Uruguay, United States and Vietnam (including during school breaks where Vietnamese children from Poland spend their time in Vietnam speaking in Polish to their siblings and friends, there are around 50 000 Vietnamese-Polish people).
In the United States, it is estimated that citizens of Polish ethnic extraction number more than 11 million, but many no longer speak Polish fluently. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as the language spoken at home: about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English, or 0.25% of the U.S. population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census (over 50%) occur in three states: Illinois (185,749), New York (111,740) and New Jersey (74,663).
Canada has a large Polish Canadian population. The 2006 census recorded 242,885 speakers of Polish, with a significant concentration in the city of Toronto, Ontario (91,810 speakers).
Dialects
The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass-migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the Soviet annexation of the Kresy in 1939. This tendency toward a homogeneity also stems from the vertically integrated nature of the authoritarian People's Republic of Poland.
The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still[update] speak "Standard" Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between these broad "dialects" appear slight. First-language speakers of Polish never experience any difficulty in mutual understanding, however non-native speakers have difficulty distinguishing regional variations. The differences are slight compared to the variety of dialects in English.
The regional differences correspond to old tribal divisions[citation needed] from around a thousand years ago; the most significant of these in terms of numbers of speakers relate to:
- 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
- Silesian, spoken in the southwest (controversial)
Some more characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include:
- The distinctive Podhale dialect (Góralski) occurs in the mountainous areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Gorals (highlanders) take great pride in their culture and the dialect. It exhibits some cultural influences from the Vlach shepherds[citation needed] who migrated from Wallachia (southern Romania) in the 14th-17th centuries[citation needed]. The language of the coextensive East Slavic[disambiguation needed] ethnic group, the Lemkos, which demonstrates significant lexical and grammatical commonality with the Góralski dialect and Ukrainian, bears no significant Vlach or other Romanian influences. Most urban Poles find it difficult to understand this very distinct dialect.
- In the western and northern regions where Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union resettled, the older generation speaks a dialect of Polish characteristic of the Eastern Borderlands which resembles Ukrainian or Rusyn— especially in the "longer" pronunciation of vowels.
- The Kashubian language, spoken in the Pomorze region west of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, a language closely related to Polish, has seemed like a dialect to some observers. However, it exhibits sufficient significant differences to merit its classification as a separate language; for instance, it is not readily understandable to Polish speakers unless written. There are about 53,000 speakers according to the 2002 census.
- The Silesian language, spoken in the Silesia region west of Katowice, a language related to Polish, has seemed like a dialect to some observers. However, it exhibits sufficient significant differences to merit its classification as a separate language[citation needed]; for instance, it is not readily understandable to Polish speakers[citation needed]. There are about 60,000 speakers according to the 2002 census.
- Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), in Belarus (particularly the northwest), 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. (Praga remained the only part of Warsaw where the population survived World War II relatively intact.) However, these city dialects are now[update] mostly extinct due to assimilation with standard Polish.
- Many Poles living in emigrant communities (for example in the USA) 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, but which now sound archaic to contemporary visitors from Poland.
Historical geographic distribution
As a result of World War II Poland's borders changed significantly and now accurately reflect the autochthonous ethnic territories of the Polish people. The change in borders was accompanied by a series of migrations (World War II evacuation and expulsion, German expulsions, Operation Vistula). Ethnic cleansing of the Poles as a result of the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia also resulted in significant demographic changes. Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union after the Second World War retained a significant Polish population unwilling or unable to migrate to post-1945 Poland.
Phonology
Polish has six oral and two nasal vowels. The Polish consonant system shows more complexity: its characteristic features include the series of affricates and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalizations and two further palatalizations which took place in Polish and Belarusian. The stress falls generally on the penultimate (second to last) syllable.
Orthography
The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics, such as kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent), kropka (superior dot) and ogonek ("little tail"). The Polish alphabet was one of two major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Slavic languages, the other being Czech orthography. Slovak uses the Czech-based system, as do Slovene and Croatian; Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, while Sorbian blends the two.