Polish language
Countries (spoken in): |
Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Czech Republic |
Official status: |
Poland, European Union |
Total speakers |
42.7 million speakers |
Polish language — is the official language of Poland. It is the most spoken West Slavic language.
Polish was a lingua franca from 1500-1700 in small parts of Central and large portions of Eastern Europe, because of the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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 east was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, during World War II.
Standard Polish is still spoken somewhat differently in different regions of the country, although the differences between these broad "dialects" are slight. There is never any difficulty in mutual understanding, and non-native speakers are generally unable to distinguish among them easily.
Polish alphabet
The Polish alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics, such as kreska (graphically similar to acute accent), kropka (superior dot) and ogonek. Unlike other Latin-character Slavic languages (apart from Kashubian), Polish did not adopt a version of the Czech orthography, but developed one independently.
A, Ą, B, C, Ć, D, E, Ę, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ł, M, N, Ń, O, Ó, P, R, S, Ś, T, U, W, Y, Z, Ź, Ż.
Polish online translators
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