The official language of Poland, Polish is spoken by over forty million people worldwide. Speakers of Polish are commonly found in Canada, France, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia - countries where they emigrated to during the two world wars. Polish is also spoken in some small regions of Ukraine, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Belarus.
A descendant of Old Polish, Polish belongs to the West-Slavic group of the Indo-European languages together with Czech and Slovak. The first document written in Polish was called "Gniezno papal bull" and it included several hundreds of Polish names.
Polish language makes use of the Latin alphabet but it also uses some diacritics. Its difficult and diverse reading rules, as well as the tendency to conglomerate numerous consonants in a row in one word, makes it difficult to be learned by foreigners. Polish nouns, pronouns and adjectives decline in seven cases. Polish verbs have three tenses, three moods and three voices and, as a peculiarity, they have a feature called "aspect". The "aspect" can be perfective or imperfective, depending on whether the action is completed or not.
The Polish language has several dialects but the differences between them are insignificant to such an extent that a non-native speaker could not make a difference between them. The most important Polish dialects are: Great Polish (used in the west), Lesser Polish (spoken in the south), Silesian (used in the South-West) and Mazovian (spoken in the East and in Central Poland).
The language of personalities like Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ludwik Zamenhof (the inventor of Esperanto), Krzysztof Kie[lowski and Roman PolaDski, Polish is a language that has always been associated with culture and history. Far from being an 'old' language, Polish continues to develop and adapt to modern times, mostly by borrowing new words from English and German.
Ioana Mihailas is a linguist for Lingo24 Translation Services. Please feel free to visit our website www.lingo24.com
Source: www.articlecity.com
