Talk Polish

Polish is the official language of Poland.  It is also used as a second language in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan partly because the borders of Poland changed after World War II as part of the Yalta Agreement.  This meant that lots of Poles ended up being outside the territory of their homeland.

Nearly 97% of the 38 million citizens of Poland state that Polish is their mother tongue.

Worldwide there are around 50 million speakers of Polish.

The Polish language uses the Latin alphabet except for ‘q’, ‘v’ and ‘x’.  It also has a few extras -

ą , ć , ę , ł , ń , ó , ś , ź ,  ż.

There are a number of dialects but in the main, native speakers of Polish are able to understand each other.  Non-native speakers are the ones who have the problem of understanding the different regional variations.  Contemporary Poles are not able to understand the texts that were written in the Middle Ages though because the language has developed so much over the years.  They need to have a dictionary of archaisms at hand whilst reading old texts.

During the period 1795-1918 the Prussian and Russian conquerors tried to eradicate Polish identity, but this was not successful and Poles retained their language almost intact.

In the USA census of 2000 667,414 Americans aged over 5 said that Polish was the language spoken at home. Most of these people live in Illinois, New York and New Jersey.

The 2006 Canadian census recorded 242,885 speakers of Polish living in Canada, most living in Toronto, Ontario (91,810 speakers). As you can see, people all around the world are able to talk Polish - so can you.

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