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Facts
about Poland
Polish Language - Język Polski ...
Polish is the official language of Poland.
It is believed to be one of the most difficult languages in the world.
Polish is the official language of Poland. It belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, and the group of West Slavic languages (alongside Czech, Slovak, Kashubian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian and the now defunct Polabian language).
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T:
Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country where nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their native language.
In the United States,
Polish Americans number more than 11 million, but most of them cannot speak
Polish fluently. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans
of age five years and over reported Polish as the language spoken at home, which
is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English, 0.25% of the US
population, and 6% of the Polish-American 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).
According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England and
Wales who consider Polish to be their "main" language.
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) and Montreal.
There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and
their descendants in many other countries around the world.
It is estimated that an average Pole has an active vocabulary of approximately 30,000 words, and a passive vocabulary of around 100,000 words which he or she does not use. According to the philologists from the University of Bialystok, it is enough to know the 1200 most frequently used words to communicate in Polish.
The Polish alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and consists of 32 letters. It includes seven digraphs
(sz, rz, cz, ch, dz, dż, dź), one
digraph (dzi) and nine
letters formed using
diacritics (ą, ć, ę, ł,
ń, ó, ś, ź, ż):
[ Gray letters are not used in Polish Alphabet ]
Letters from Latin
alphabet:: Q, V i X are
not on the Polish
Alphabet,
because
there is no need for
them in Polish word
formation. They occur
only in words of foreign
origin, ie borrowed
letters.
There are seven grammatical cases and types of conjugation. Cases apply to nouns, adjectives, and participles in the function of modifiers, pronouns substituting nouns, adjectives and numerals, as well as numerals.
The originality of
Polish culture is tied
to its language and to
its Slavonic roots.
Linguistic studies
indicate that 5000 to
4000 years ago early
Balto-Slavic languages
were part of the Aryan
or the Eastern
Indo-European languages.
Over 3500 years ago, the
languages of the Balto-Slavs
separated from the Aryan
languages. Than about 3000
years ago, the Baltic
and Slavic languages
separated from each
other, and for the next 1500
years, the Slavic
languages evolved
parallel to the Greek,
Latin, Celtic, Germanic,
and other languages.
The evolution of the
Polish language occurred
during the following
1500 years.
The oldest sentence in the Polish language: ‘Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai’ was written in 1270 in Wrocław, in the Book of Henryków. Fifteen years later, at the gathering in Łęczyca, it was decided that the Polish language will be used next to Latin in cloister and cathedral schools.
The Polish language has been influenced by Latin, Greek, German, Czech, Ruthenian, Turkish, French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and Yiddish. Currently, it is most influenced by the lingua franca of our times – the English language.
The main dialects of the Polish language include: Greater Polish, Lesser Polish, Silesian, Masovian, Chełm-Kociewie-Warmian and North- and South-Eastern Borderlands’ dialects.
Polish is a highly inflected language, with relatively free word order, although
the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO).
More information about Polish language you may find on web site: www.wikipedia.org
