Polish language

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.

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.

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.

Dialects

Polish became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century. Partly due to universal education, but also because of 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 them without conscious effort. I.e., these differences are slight compared to different dialects of English, for example. The regional differences correspond in the main to old tribal divisions from around 1000 years ago; 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 (see below),

Some more characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include:

The distinctive Góralski dialect is spoken in the mountaineous areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Górale take great pride in their culture and the dialect.
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 (the Kresy).
The Kashubian language, spoken in the Pomorze region west of Gdańsk on the Baltic sea is closely related to Polish, and was once considered a dialect by some. However, the differences are large enough to merit its classification as a separate language (for instance, it is not readily understandable to Polish speakers unless written, and contains many loanwords from German.) There were about 53 000 speakers accordint to the 2002 census)
Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), Belarus (particularly the northwest), and in the north-east of Poland continue to speak the eastern (Kresy) dialect which is said to be much more "musical" than standard Polish.
Some city dwellers (especially the less affluent population) had their own distinctive dialects. An example of this is the Warsaw dialect, still spoken by some of the population of Praga, on the eastern bank of the Vistula. (Praga was the only part of the city whose population survived World War II somewhat intact). However, these city dialects are now mostly extinct due to assimilation with standard Polish.
Many Poles living in immigrant communities, e.g. in the USA, who arrived there just after World War II, or whose parents arrived then, retain many small features of Polish vocabulary as it was spoken in the first half of the 20th century, but which appear unusual to contemporary visitors from Poland.

Borrowed words

Polish has, over the centuries, borrowed a large number of words from other languages. Borrowed words have been usually rapidly "domesticated" in the following ways:

Their spelling was usually altered to approximately keep the pronounciation, but have them written according to Polish phonetics.
Word endings are liberally applied to almost any word to produce verbs, nouns, adjectives, as well as adding the appropriate endings for cases of nouns, diminutives, augmentatives, etc.

Depending on the historical period, borrowing has proceeded from various languages. Recent borrowing is primarily of "international" words from the English language that tend to have Latin or Greek roots. For example komputer (computer), biznes (business), produkcja (production), korupcja (corruption) etc. Slang sometimes borrows and alters common English words, e.g. luknąć (to look), but these borrowings are usually short lived, going out of fashion after several years. Concatenation of parts of words (e.g. auto-moto), which is not native to Polish but common in e.g. English is sometimes used.

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).

Other notable influences in the past have been Latin (16th-18th century), Czech (10th and 14th-15th century), French (18th-19th century), German, Italian (15th-16th century), Old Belarusian, Ukrainian), Russian).

Many words have been borrowed from the German language, as a result of being neighbours for a millennium, and also due to a sizeable German population in Polish cities in 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"). The regional dialects of Upper Silesia and teh Mazurs (former East Prussia) have noticebly more German loanwords than other dialects.

Latin was a language known to a larger or smaller degree by most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries. Its influence can still be seen somewhat by the greater number of verbatim Latin phrases in Polish literature (especially from the 19th century and earlier), than, say, in English.

In the 18th century French supplanted Latin in this respect, along with France's rising prominence in Europe at this time. Some words also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Poles were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon. Examples include 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.

Some words like bachor (an unruly boy or child) were borrowed from Yiddish, spoken by the large Polish jewish population before their death in the holocaust.

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

The mountain dialects of the Gorale in southern Poland, have quite a number of words borrowed from Hungarian (e.g. Baca) and Romanian from historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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