Polish: a short portrait

Polish is a Slavic language, a sister of Czech and Slovak and a cousin of Russian and Ukrainian. All the Slavic languages go back to a common ancestor, Proto-Slavic, which spread over large parts of eastern and central Europe in the first millennium AD. Polish grew out of its western branch, together with Kashubian on the Baltic coast and the Sorbian languages in eastern Germany.

It is distantly related to English: both are Indo-European, and you can still see it in words such as brat (brother), siostra (sister), noc (night), nos (nose) or trzy (three). The way the language is built, though, is quite different: seven cases, no articles, two forms of almost every verb.

With the baptism of Duke Mieszko I in 966, Latin Christianity and the Latin alphabet came to Poland. At first only Latin was written; Polish words appear as the names of places and people in Latin documents. The oldest known complete sentence is in the “Book of Henryków” from around 1270: a peasant says to his wife Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai — let me grind, and you take a rest.

In the sixteenth century Polish became a language of literature. Mikołaj Rej was one of the first to write deliberately only in Polish, and Jan Kochanowski turned it into great poetry. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Polish was the language of the nobility and the towns far beyond the borders of today’s Poland.

Between 1795 and 1918 there was no independent Polish state: the country was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and schools and offices often used another language. Polish survived in families, in the church and in literature; Samuel Bogumił Linde’s great dictionary also dates from this time. Since 1918 Polish has again been the language of the state, and in 1999 it was given its own law regulating its use in public life.

Polish is the language of almost everyone in Poland, and it is remarkably uniform: someone from Gdańsk is understood without effort in Kraków — far less variation than between the accents of Britain. Dialects do exist, most noticeably in Silesia and in the mountains around Zakopane, where the highlanders keep their own gwara. Kashubian, in the north around Gdańsk, is legally recognised in Poland as a regional language.

Outside Poland there are long-established Polish-speaking communities in Lithuania, above all around Vilnius, in Belarus and in Ukraine. Then there are the Poles who emigrated — to North America from the nineteenth century on, and to Britain, Ireland and Germany above all in recent decades. In many British towns you will hear Polish in the street and find a polski sklep, a Polish shop.

Polish uses the Latin alphabet, and its spelling is very regular — far more regular than English: once you know the rules, you can read almost any word aloud. What looks strange at first are the letter groups. sz sounds like “sh”, cz like “ch” in “church”, ch like the Scottish “loch”, and w like an English v. The letter c on its own is always “ts”, as in “cats”.

Then there are the letters with strokes, dots and hooks. ą and ę are nasal vowels, as in French. ś, ć, ź and ń are soft sounds, and before an i they are written without the stroke: siedem, ciocia. ł once sounded like a dark l and today sounds like an English w: łyżka, the spoon.

Some spelling differences can no longer be heard. ó and u sound the same, as do rz and ż (like the s in “pleasure”), and usually h and ch. A related word often tells you which spelling is right: stół is written with ó because the plural is stoły. Stress falls almost always on the second-to-last syllable — the rule that helps you most when reading aloud, and a relief after English, where stress has to be learnt word by word.

Over the centuries Polish took a great many words from German, especially in crafts, trade and town life: ratusz (town hall, from “Rathaus”), rynek (market square, from “Ring”), dach (roof), szyba (window pane), cegła (brick), burmistrz (mayor, from “Bürgermeister”).

From Latin came words of the church, schools and government, and from French and Italian words of fine living: fotel(armchair)plaża(beach)pomidor(tomato)kalafior(cauliflower) Today most new words come from English — weekend, laptop, smartfon — and they take Polish endings straight away: w weekend, na laptopie.

English has borrowed a little in return: “mazurka” is a Polish dance, and “kielbasa” and “pierogi” arrived with Polish emigrants in North America. Even the “gherkin” goes back, by way of Dutch and German, to a Slavic word that is ogórek in Polish.

There are no articles. dom means “house”, “a house” and “the house”, and what English shows with word order and prepositions, Polish shows with the ending of the noun — in seven cases. English speakers know cases only from “he, him, his”; in Polish every noun, adjective and pronoun has them.

Almost every verb comes twice: pisać for writing as an activity, napisać for the letter that is finished at the end — a little like the difference between “was writing” and “wrote”, but built into the verb itself. And the past tense gives away who is speaking: Ania says byłam, Piotr says byłem — both mean “I was”.

With several people, Polish counts men separately. If a man is in the group, it is oni byli, otherwise one były. And finally the numbers: from five on, the noun goes into the genitive plural, dwa koty, but pięć kotów. It sounds a lot, but you learn it step by step, and the regular spelling and fixed stress give you back a great deal of what the endings cost.

Short facts to wonder at. One at a time, they also turn up at the end of a practice round — folded away, so they never get in the way.

1. Polish has two nasal vowels, written ą and ę: ręka (hand), są (they are).
2. Today ł mostly sounds like an English w: łódź (boat) and the city of Łódź, roughly “wooj”.
3. W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie — “In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reeds” — is one of the best-known tongue twisters.
4. Polish has seven cases. One of them, the vocative, is used only to address someone: Anna becomes Anno!
5. Stress almost always falls on the second-to-last syllable: Polska, dziękuję.
6. Marie Skłodowska-Curie named polonium, the element she discovered in 1898, after her homeland, Poland.
7. The Polish alphabet has 32 letters, among them ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż.
8. Polish has no articles: dom means “house”, “a house” or “the house”.
9. In the plural Polish distinguishes whether a group includes men: oni for men or mixed groups, one for everyone else.
10. Ludwik Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, was born in Białystok in 1859.
11. Kashubian, spoken in the north around Gdańsk, is legally recognised in Poland as a regional language.
12. Polish loves diminutives: kot (cat) becomes kotek, Anna becomes Ania.
13. Politely you address people as Pan (sir) and Pani (madam) in the third person: Czy pan ma czas? — “Has the gentleman got time?”
14. Almost every verb comes in two forms: robić for doing, zrobić for getting it done.
15. Nicolaus Copernicus, in Polish Mikołaj Kopernik, was born in Toruń in 1473.
16. On Christmas Eve, Wigilia, it is the custom to lay one extra place — for an unexpected guest.
17. Many surnames have a feminine form: Mr Kowalski, Mrs Kowalska.
18. Two letters often stand for one sound: sz like “sh”, cz like “ch” in “church”, rz like ż, the “s” in “pleasure”.
19. There is a Polish-speaking minority in Lithuania, above all in the area around Vilnius.
20. Na zdrowie! — “to health” — is what you say when raising a glass and when someone sneezes.