The official language and the widely spoken language in Poland is Polish. It primarily belongs to the larger Indo-European family of languages. Polish is a West Slavic language under Lechitic sub-group and is closely related Czech and Slovak. The Polish Alphabet has 32 letters, 23 consonants, and 9 vowels. Q, V, and X are excluded from the 32 letters since they are originally not Polish, they are mainly used in foreign words only.
Polish, after Russian, is the second most widely spoken Slavic language. Approximately 38.5 million Poles speak Polish as their first and native language, accounting for over 95% of the population. This is a great percentage keeping in mind that there are approximately 55 million Polish speakers worldwide. More than half the Poles speak English-Russian as their second language.
Polish utilizes a free-word order. However, the most common word order used in Polish is Subject-Verb-Object. The nouns are categorized into 3 genders: feminine, masculine, and the neuter, just like in most Indo-European languages. Polish has quite a large number of loanwords. As Polish borrows vocabulary from other languages, the pronunciation and the spellings of the words are altered a little so that they correspond with the Polish Orthography rules. Polish has mostly borrowed from English. Other languages that Polish has heavily borrowed from include Turkish, Italian, French and Czech.
Besides Polish, there are other languages spoken in Poland. Among the common languages spoken in Poland include Lithuanian, Czech, Belarusian, Slovak, Kashubian, and other Jewish Languages such as Yiddish and Hebrew. Silesian has approximately half a million speakers. English is spoken by approximately 103,000 people whereas German has approximately 96,461 speakers. 16 languages in the country are officially recognized as minority languages; one as a regional language, ten as national minority languages, and five as ethnic minority languages.
This page was last modified on May 1st, 2018
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