Polish

Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group, written in the Latin script. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. In addition to being the official language of Poland, it is also used by Polish minorities in other countries. There are over 50 million Polish speakers around the world – it is the sixth-most-spoken language of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T-V distinction pronouns, honorifics and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals.

Polish is written in the traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet, which has nine additions to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż). The letters x, q and v are at times included in the extended 35-letter alphabet, however, these are not used in native words. The set comprises 23 consonants and 9 written vowels, including two nasal vowels defined by a reversed diacritic hook called "ogonek" (ę, ą). Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases, and is one of few languages in the world possessing continuous penultimate stress with only a few exceptions, and the only in its group having an abundance of palatal consonants. The contemporary variety of Polish was developed in the 1700s as a successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries).

Among the major languages, it is most closely related to Slovak and Czech, but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar. In addition, Polish was profoundly influenced by Latin and other Romance languages like Italian and French as well as Germanic languages (most notably German), which contributed to a large number of loanwords and similar grammatical structures. Extensive usage of nonstandard dialects has also shaped the standard language; considerable colloquialisms and expressions were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish, and subsequently adopted into the vernacular of Polish which is in everyday use.

Historically, Polish was a lingua franca, important both diplomatically and academically in Central and part of Eastern Europe. Today, Polish is spoken by approximately 38 million people as their first language in Poland. It is also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany, northern Czech Republic and Slovakia, western parts of Belarus and Ukraine as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia. Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II, millions of Polish speakers can also be found in countries such as Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.