Polish
Description
Polish is spoken by about 43 million people of whom some 36.5 million speakers live in Poland, where it is the official language. After the end of WWII with readjustment of borders, Poland became more linguistically and ethnically homogeneous; with over 98% of the population speaking Polish. Another 2.5 million live in the USA, and 1 million in Ukraine, and 100,000 or so in each of the Czech republic, Slovakia, Germany, Israel, and Canada; lesser numbers are in Australia and Romania.
Polish is a Slavic--or Slavonic--language and belongs to the West Slavic subgroup, which also includes Czech, Slovak, Cassubian (or Kashubian; spoken in the Baltic coast region in northern Poland), Sorbian (Saxony and Brandenburg, Germany), and Polabian, now extinct.
Polish uses a Latin-based alphabet, introduced in the tenth century with Christianity. It uses numerous diagraphs, and diacritics on certain consonants and vowels. Some variation exists in the spelling of some sounds.
Polish has borrowed extensively from German and Yiddish, and there is some borrowing from East Slavic languages. Other languages contributing lexis have been Latin, Czech, Lithuanian, French, and Italian.
In the fourteenth century whole texts in Polish begin to appear, the earliest being religious in nature, for example, a collection of sermons and a translation of the Psalms.
The sixteenth century--the Golden Age of Polish literature--saw the first printing of dictionaries, grammars, and spelling guides. Poland was first partitioned in 1772 and with it the language entered a crisis period with different occupying powers, Germany and Russia primarily, attempting to replace Polish with their own languages.
(Source: UCLA Language Materials Project Language Profiles)
Instructor
Elizabeth Sachs
Email
esachs@sas.upenn.edu