Polish Language Services

Do you know that Polish is one of the most spoken European Languages and is one of the top ten Languages spoken in the UK?

Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) describes a Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages in Central Europe and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds to the Latin alphabet with several additions. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner throughout most of Poland. 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 third most widely spoken Slavic language, after Russian and Ukrainian. Geographical distribution > Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country; 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 western Lviv and Volyn oblast (provinces), 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. 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 that 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 still speak “standard” Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between regional dialects appear slight. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing regional variations.Polish is normally described as consisting of four or five main dialects: 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, and Silesian, spoken in the southwest. Kashubian, spoken in the Pomorze region west of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, is often considered a fifth dialect. It contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs. the five of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages.

Check out this blog post about Polish Dialects and Languages. Knowing them is crucial before starting an English to Polish Translation Project!