Polish language

Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland (being that country's official language) and by Polish minorities in other countries. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet, which has several additions to the letters of the basic Latin script.

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 second most widely spoken Slavic language, after Russian and ahead of Ukrainian.

Geographic distribution
Poland is one of the most linguistically homogeneous European countries; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. Elsewhere, ethnic Poles constitute large 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 is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania; in Ukraine it is most common in the Lviv and Lutsk regions, while in Western Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority especially in the Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border.

There are also significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries, including Argentina, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, the 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, Turkey, Ukraine, the UAE, the UK, Uruguay and the United States.

In the United States, Polish Americans number more than 11 million (see: Polish language in the United States) but most of them cannot 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, which is 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%) were found in three states: Illinois (185,749), New York (111,740) and New Jersey (74,663).

In Canada, there is a significant Polish Canadian population: there are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to the 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto (91,810 speakers).

The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the border changes and population transfers that followed World War II. Poles settled in the "Recovered Territories" in the west and north, which had previously been mostly German-speaking. Some Poles remained in the previously Polish-ruled territories in the east which were annexed by the USSR, resulting in the present-day Polish-speaking minorities in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, although many Poles were expelled or emigrated from those areas to areas within Poland's new borders. Meanwhile the flight and expulsion of Germans, as well as the expulsion of Ukrainians and resettlement of Ukrainians within Poland, contributed to the country's linguistic homogeneity.

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, and the acquisition of former German territory after World War II. 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 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.

Main three dialects of Polish language:
 * 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

Some more characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include:
 * 1) The distinctive Podhale dialect (Góralski) occurs in the mountainous area 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 who migrated from Wallachia (southern Romania) in the 14th-17th centuries. The language of the coextensive East Slavic people, 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.
 * 2) The Poznanski dialect, spoken in Poznań and to some extent in the whole region of the former Prussian annexation (excluding upper Silesia), with characteristic high tone melody and notable influence of the German language.
 * 3) In the northern and western (formerly German) regions where Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union resettled after World War II, 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.
 * 4) 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" (in Polish described as zaciąganie z ruska, 'speaking with a Russian drawl'), and is easily distinguishable.
 * 5) 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  mostly extinct due to assimilation with standard Polish.
 * 6) 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 that now sound archaic, however, to contemporary visitors from Poland.

Previously regarded as dialects, now increasingly recognized as languages:
 * 1) The Kashubian language, spoken in the Pomorze region west of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, 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 native 106,000 speakers according to the Polish 2011 census, while being the third most used language in Poland, after Polish language and Silesian language.


 * 1) The Silesian language is spoken in the Upper Silesia region, mainly in the Silesian Voivodeship and Opole Voivodeship in Poland and also in the Moravian–Silesian Region in Czech Republic. Only in Poland there are above 0.5 million native speakers according to the 2011 census, while being the second most used language in Poland, after Polish language.

Phonology
Polish has six oral vowels (all monophthongs) and two nasal vowels. The oral vowels are (spelt i), // (spelt y),  (spelt e),  (spelt a),  (spelt o) and  (spelt u or ó). The nasal vowels are (spelt ę) and  (spelt ą).

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 that took place in Polish and Belarusian. The full set of consonants, together with their most common spellings, can be presented as follows (although other phonological analyses exist):
 * plosives (p),  (b),  (t),  (d),  (k),  (g), and the palatized forms  (ki) and  (gi)
 * fricatives (f),  (w),  (s),  (z),  (sz),  (ż, rz), the alveolo-palatals  (ś, si) and  (ź, zi), and  (ch, h) and  (chi, hi)
 * affricates (c),  (dz),  (cz),  (dż),  (ć, ci),  (dź, dzi) (these are written here without ties, for browser display compatibility, although Polish does distinguish between affricates as in czy, and stop+fricative clusters as in trzy'')
 * nasals (m),  (n),  (ń, ni)
 * approximants (l),  (j),  (ł)
 * trill (r)

Neutralization occurs between voiced–voiceless consonant pairs in certain environments: at the end of words (where devoicing occurs), and in certain consonant clusters (where assimilation occurs). For details, see Voicing and devoicing in the article on Polish phonology.

The stress falls generally on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable of a polysyllabic word, although there are exceptions.

Orthography
The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin script, but includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics. 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.

The diacritics used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent) in the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and through the letter in ł; the kropka (superior dot) in the letter ż, and the ogonek ("little tail") in the letters ą, ę. The letters q, v, x are often not considered part of the Polish alphabet; they are used only in foreign words and names.

Polish orthography is largely phonemic – there is a consistent correspondence between letters (or digraphs and trigraphs) and phonemes (for exceptions see below). The letters of the alphabet and their normal phonemic values are listed in the following table.