Polish Language Guide

Official language in
Poland
Script
Latin

Where it's spoken

Polish is the official language of the Republic of Poland: the constitution states that Polish shall be the official language in the Republic of Poland, while also protecting the language rights of national minorities guaranteed by international agreements that Poland has ratified. Polish belongs to the West Slavic branch of the Slavic language family, alongside Czech, Slovak, and Upper and Lower Sorbian.

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Script & pronunciation

Polish is written in the Latin alphabet, but because Polish has more consonant sounds than English, its spelling adds a set of diacritics and letter combinations that plain Latin letters do not cover. The extra letters include ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż, and letter pairs such as sz, cz, rz and dz combine two letters into a single sound, the way English ch or sh does. The letter i also has a special job after c, dz, s, z and n: it signals the same palatal sound as ć, dź, ś, ź and ń, so ci, dzi, si, zi and ni are read the same way as those single letters with a following vowel. With very few exceptions, Polish word stress falls on the next-to-last syllable of a word, as in tablica, student and czasopismo. This app's romanization respells Polish spelling with English-style letter combinations rather than reproducing the Polish letters themselves — sz becomes sh and cz or ć become ch, for instance — and it capitalizes the stressed syllable, which lines up with the next-to-last-syllable pattern: the card Proszę pokazać paszport ("Please show your passport") is romanized PROH-sheh poh-KAH-zach PAHSH-port, and the card Czy mogę zapłacić kartą? ("Can I pay by card?") is romanized chi MO-geh za-PWA-chich KAR-toh?.

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Grammar essentials

Polish nouns, pronouns and adjectives change their endings to mark one of seven grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative), and every noun has one of three genders. The nominative is the dictionary form, and it is also the form used in simple questions, as in this app's card Gdzie jest toaleta? ("Where is the toilet/bathroom?"), where toaleta stays in the nominative. Other cases appear once a word is doing something other than simply being named: the card Witamy w Polsce! ("Welcome to Poland!") puts Polska into the locative w Polsce after the preposition w ("in"); the card Czy mogę zapłacić kartą? ("Can I pay by card?") puts karta into the instrumental kartą to mean "by/with a card"; and the card Na ile nocy zamierza pan/pani zostać? ("How many nights are you planning to stay?") puts noc into the genitive nocy after the quantity word ile ("how many"). Basic word order is subject-verb-object, but because the case endings, rather than word order, show which word is doing what, the order is fairly free. Yes/no questions can be formed simply by placing czy at the start of a sentence, as in the card Czy ma pan/pani coś do zadeklarowania? ("Do you have anything to declare?"). Polish verbs also come in one of two aspects: perfective verbs present an action as a complete whole, while imperfective verbs are used for a continuing or repeated action, or simply when whether the action was completed is not the point. This app's card Kupować ("To buy") notes that the imperfective kupować pairs with the perfective kupić, and that a single purchase takes the perfective.

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Politeness & etiquette

Besides the familiar singular ty and plural wy, which take ordinary second-person verb forms, Polish has a set of polite address words built on the root pan-: pan for a man, pani for a woman, panowie/panie for a group of men/women, and państwo for a mixed group. These words for "you" take third-person verb agreement even though they refer to the person being addressed. This app's cards show the contrast directly: the formal card Jak się pan/pani ma? ("How are you? (formal)") uses the third-person ma, while its casual counterpart Jak się masz? uses the second-person masz. Pan and pani also decline like ordinary nouns: the card Miło mi pana/panią poznać ("Nice to meet you") puts pan into its accusative form pana for a man and pani into panią for a woman. Formal questions addressed to a stranger keep the same pattern, as in the card Czy ma pan/pani coś do zadeklarowania? ("Do you have anything to declare?").

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