Polish, the native language of notable figures such as Copernicus, Chopin, Roman Polanski, and Marie Curie, is spoken as a first language by over 38 million people in Poland, over one million in other Eastern European nations, and another million in North America.

Polish is written using the Roman alphabet with the addition of diacritical markings (special characters). It has 10 vowels and 35 consonants, making it a very rich phonetically. The penultimate syllable of a word is usually stressed when pronouncing it.

The preservation of nasal vowels in spoken Polish, which are no longer found in other modern Slavic languages, is a distinguishing trait. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives have seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, and locative), much like in Czech.

Poland, or Polska as its citizens refer to it, is one of the wealthiest countries in the former Soviet Union. With EU membership in May 2004, the private sector currently accounts for more than 75% of the country's GDP. The economy is strongly interwoven with that of western European countries, and inflation has been kept low. After a brief dip, productivity has been steadily increasing for more than a decade, and Poles are today significantly better off than they were a decade ago. As a result, polish language services have grown in prominence over time.

Polish language origins

Polish is an Indo-European language from the West Slavonic language family. In the early Middle Ages, proto-Slavonic tribes left their homelands between the Odra and Dnieper rivers and inhabited nearly all of central, eastern, and southern Europe, reaching the Elba in the west, the Volga and Dvina in the east, and the Balkan Peninsula in the south.

The formation of three groupings of Slavonic languages: west, south, and east, was one of the consequences of this spread. Czech and Slovak are also part of the West Slavonic group, and while they are closely related, these languages are not totally mutually intelligible.

The Polish Language's Evolution

The formation and development of the Polish state significantly triggered the emergence of Polish around the 10th century. Before adopting baptism in 966, Mieszko I, ruler of the Polanie from Wielkopolska, joined a few culturally and linguistically related tribes from the Vistula and Odra basins. With the adoption of Christianity, Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet, allowing Polish, which had hitherto only existed as a spoken language, to be written down.

The initial clergy-produced manuscripts were only in Latin, but they occasionally had to include ethnically Slavonic names. From that time period, three documents with such insertions have survived. The Dagome judex is the oldest, in which Mieszko I submitted his state to the Pope. It was composed between the years 990 and 992 and contained a description of the duke's domains as well as information on his two largest cities, Gniezno and Cracow.

The first written writings in Polish were translations of Latin prayers and sermons into the vernacular so that the faithful might comprehend what they were doing in church. The first secular literature appeared gradually in the 13th century. The first written documents consisted of only two sentences, one spoken by a peasant and the other by a king.

Around 1440, Jakub Parkoszowic of Zurawica published a Latin book on Polish spelling, which was the first attempt to codify the rules of the Polish language. Polish began to be used in legal documents and court records around the same time. Around 1400, the first secular poem in Polish was written. It was written to celebrate the joys of dining. However, it took another four centuries for the first Polish dictionary to be written. Between 1807 and 1814, Samuel Bogumil Linde produced a six-volume book with 1200 copies in Warsaw.

Silesia, Malopolska, Mazovia, Wielkopolska, and Kashubia are the five primary dialects of Polish. This is a holdover from the days when each Slavonic tribe had its own language, which evolved and altered slowly over decades. This occurred primarily outside of major cities, among small-town gentry and peasants. Each dialect has multiple variants, each with its own set of linguistic characteristics. The vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation, and morphology of these variations differ from standard Polish.

The emergence of new, mixed dialects in the country's north and west, where tens of thousands of people relocated after WWII, is a fascinating phenomenon that began about 1954.

Other languages, such as English, French, German, Latin, and Russian, are greatly influenced by Polish.

Various reasons have influenced these effects, ranging from an interest with foreign cultures (borrowings from French) to historical events such as partitions (borrowings from German and Russian) to acceptance of Christianity (borrowings from Latin).

The most influential period for French was the 18th century, when it was spoken by nearly everyone who wished to be seen as educated and well-traveled – at the time, French was Europe's equivalent of English.

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