Polish Language
Polish alphabet, Polish orthography, Polish language history and sources
Polish language
Polish: Official language of Poland.
Number of Polish Speakers: 39 million in Poland and 3 million in other countries.
Polish Speakers: In Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine, Germany, Israel, Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Language Classification: Slavic family of languages.
Polish Alphabet: Latin-based alphabet.
Polish Orthography: Word order is grammatically free. Modern Polish has 10 vowels and 35 consonants. It kept its nasal vowels, which other Slavic languages eliminated. Verb is inflected to indicate gender as well as person and number. Nouns have seven cases. Word order in sentence is fluid (unlike English).
Polish Language History: Earliest scripts from the 4th century. Portions of Bible were translated in mid-15th century. First printing in 1513.
Polish Standardization Efforts: Standardization of spelling introduced with printing in 1513.
Polish Language Enriched by: German (during Middle ages), Italian (during Renaissance), French (during 17th and 18th centuries), English, Yiddish, Latin, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian.
Unique Features of Polish: Extremely rich language phonetically. That's why pronunciation is difficult. Stress is on the penultimate (next to last) syllable.
For more linguistic affiliation, language variation, orthography, linguistic sketch, and history of Polish language UCLA Language Materials Project has a good linguistics and interlingual background information on Polish.
Polish language is included in the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) which is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
"Free" instant quote for Polish translation by email: translation@acrusa.net or call: 858-922-7724 or Fax: 480-247-5474
