About the Polish language

About Polish

Polish is spoken by about 45 million people worldwide, of which the majority, 37 million live in Poland. Large Polish speaking communities are to be found in many of its neighbouring countries above all Belorussia, but also Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The countries with the largest Polish speaking communities in Western Europe are Germany and Ireland.

At least 2.5 million Polish speaking people live in the United States. Other Polish speaking minorities are to be found in Argentina, Australia and Israel.

Influences on Polish from other languages

Due to its central location in Europe Polish has been influenced by other languages, above all from the Czech language.

Polish is written with the Roman alphabet

Polish is, in contrast to for example Russian, written in the Roman alphabet rather than the Cyrillic alphabet.
Nonetheless it does have some special letters:

ą – ć – ę – ł – ń – ó – ś – ź – ż.

(These special letters are integrated into the Study Software from 17 Minute Languages so that it will be possible enter these letters when using the software.)

Would you like to listen to the Polish alphabet?

We asked a native speaker to record the ABC in Polish for you:

A b c d e f g,
h i j k l ł m n o p,
q r s t u v w,
x y z.

Polish Nobel Prize Laureates

Up to the present four Poles have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: H. Sienkiewicz, W.S. Reymont, C. Miłosz und W. Szymborska.

Polish – a (West) Slavonic language

Polish belongs to the Slavonic Group of Languages.

The Slavonic languages are divided into The East Slavonic Languages(Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian), in the South Slavonic Languages (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Croatian, Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian) and the West Slavonic Languages. The last group includes Slovakian, Czech and Polish.

All these languages originated from Proto-Slavic that developed from the Indo-Germanic languages about five thousand years ago. Slavonic languages are spoken by approximately 300 million Native speakers worldwide.

Overview of Polish

Number of speakers: at least 45 million speakers
Official language in Poland and the European Union
Spoken in: Poland, various countries in East and West Europe, USA, Canada, Israel, Argentina, Australia
Slavonic language
Characteristics: seven cases (Nominative,Genitive,Dative,Accusative,Locative,Instrumental and Vocative) capital letters for first letters of sentences and proper nouns
Script: Roman alphabet, with additional letters

Would you like to learn more about Polish?

We are delighted about your interest in the Polish Language.
We are pleased to offer the following links:

Here is the English language entry about the Polish language from Wikipedia.
Would you like to learn Polish?
We would like to help you learn the 50 most important words in Polish for free.

Do you know the Polish language courses from 17 Minute Languages?
Level A1/A2: Basic Polish for Beginners
Level B1/B2: Further Polish for Intermediate Students
Level C1/C2: Advanced Polish Vocabulary with other 1,800 words
Level B2-C2: Business Polish