Polish language

Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic branch, written in the Latin alphabet. It is among the most widely used languages. It is largely spoken in Poland, where it serves as the native language of the Polish people. Additionally, it is spoken by Polish minority in various countries, in addition to being the official language of Poland. Polish is spoken by more than 50 million people all over the globe, making it the sixth most widely spoken language in the European Union overall. Polish is separated into regional dialects, and when addressing persons, pronouns, honorifics, and different types of formality are used to preserve a precise T-V difference.

Polish is written using the old 32-letter Polish alphabet, which includes nine additional letters to the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż). The letters x, q, and v are sometimes included in the expanded 35-letter alphabet; however, these letters are not utilised in native language and are not included in the extended 35-letter alphabet. Two nasal vowels (ogonek) are characterised by a reversed diacritic hook (ogonek) and are included in the set of 23 consonants and 9 written vowels (including two nasal vowels defined by an ogonek). Polish is a synthetic and fusional language with seven grammatical cases. It is one of only a few languages in the world to have continuous penultimate stress with only a few exceptions, and it is the only language in its group to have an abundance of palatal consonants. It is also one of the few languages in the world to have continuous penultimate stress. As a successor to the historical Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries) dialects, the present variant of Polish was formed in the 1700s.

It is the most closely related major language to Slovak and Czech, however it varies in terms of pronunciation and basic grammar from those two languages. Additional influences on Polish came from Latin and other Romance languages such as Italian and French, but also from Germanic languages (particularly German), which resulted in a huge number of loanwords and comparable grammatical structures being borrowed from Latin and other Romance languages. Nonstandard dialects have also had an impact on the standard language; many colloquialisms and idioms were directly acquired from German or Yiddish and then accepted into the vernacular of Polish that is now in widespread use in daily life.

For most of its history, Polish was the de facto language of communication in Central and Eastern Europe, serving as a bridge between diplomats and academics. Polish is the native language of around 38 million people in Poland, who speak it as their mother tongue. Also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany, northern Czech Republic and Slovakia, western sections of Belarus and Ukraine, as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia, it is also spoken as a third language in the United Kingdom. As a result of the exodus from Poland over various periods of time, most notably following World War II, millions of Polish speakers may be found in nations such as Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among other places.