Polish is a member of the West Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Polish is spoken as first language by about 38 million people in Poland, where it is the official language; by more than 1 million in other countries of Eastern Europe; and by about 1 million in North America. The Polish language is written in the Roman alphabet. It is extremely rich phonetically, having 10 vowels and 35 consonants. In pronunciation, stress is normally placed on the penultimate syllable of a word. A distinctive feature is the preservation in spoken Polish of nasal vowels which are no longer found in other modern Slavic tongues. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives have seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, and locative). The verb is inflected to indicate gender as well as person and number, and can do so without the use of personal pronouns. There are three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). A large number of diminutive and augmentative forms is also characteristic. Vocabulary of Polish is basically Slavic, but it has been enriched by borrowings from German in the Middle Ages, from Italian during the Renaissance, from French in the 17th and 18th cent., and also from English, White Russian, and Ukrainian.

Brief vocabulary