T      THE LANGUAGE

            The official language of Poland is Polish. In fact, Poland is the most homogenous European country of its mother tongue, as close to 98% of Polish citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. Polish as well as English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. The Polish language is a member of Slavic Group of languages among them are Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, etc. Polish, like English, uses the Latin alphabet. 

The Polish alphabet contains 32 letters. Unlike Latin, however, Polish has some few different letters introduced below.

POLISH ALPHABET

Within the consonant system one can distinguish letter combinations that are important in spelling rules. Polish orthography includes seven diagraphs listed below. 

The most popular Polish tongue twister is a sentence from a poem by Jan Brzechwa ”Chrząszcz”. 

            ”W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie”. In the town of Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed. 

In Polish the stress falls generally on the last syllable.

POLISH GRAMMAR

The grammar of Polish language is complex. Gender plays an important role in the classification of nouns. All Polish nouns are either masculine, feminine or neuter. It is easy to determine the gender of Polish noun by looking at their endings and the meaning.  Unlike English nouns, Polish nouns do not have any articles in front of them.

1.      Nouns that end in “-a” are usually feminine e.g., kobieta (woman) with few exceptions such as kierowca (driver), sprzedawca (salesman), mężczyzna (man) which are masculine. 

2.      Nouns that end in “-o” are usually neuter e.g., dziecko (child). 

3.  Most other nouns that end in a consonant are masculine, and their exact gender agrees with their meaning e.g., samochód (car), chłopiec (boy).  However, masculine nouns are divided among each other such as: person-masculine – “Adam”, animate-masculine – “kot” (cat), inanimate-masculine – komputer (computer).

Since Polish nouns are classified as masculine, feminine and neuter. The adjectives and pronouns that modify them must agree in gender, number and case with them.

e.g.,      dobry nauczyciel (good male teacher)

dobra nauczycielka (good female teacher)

dobre dziecko (good child)

The plural form of nouns are derived by a change in the endings.

The most typical word order in Polish sentence is:

Subject (in nominative case) – Verb (Polish verbs undergo conjugation) – Object (in accusative case)

e.g., Adam ma komputer.

However, the word order in Polish sentence can be changed. It is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject or object if there are obvious from context.  In particular, personal pronouns “ja” (I) and “ty” (you), and also their plural equivalents “my” (we), “wy” (you, plural) are almost always dropped.

In English, there are no grammatical cases which show the word function within the sentence.  Instead, the word order and pronouns indicate their function. In Polish, word order alone rarely identifies the function of any word in sentence. Usually, its role is indicated by the way in which the word ends. All Polish nouns and adjectives decline.  Their ending depends on the position of a word in a sentence. There are seven cases of noun and adjective declension in Polish: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative

The vocative case usually has the same form as nominative, and is very rare in practice.

The locative is never used alone, only in connection with certain prepositions, like “w”(in) and “o” (about).

                        e.g., Anna mieszka w Warszawie. (Anna lives in Warsaw - ”Warsaw” is in locative case).

The instrumental may be used alone for the name of the tool that is used for a given action, or with some prepositions, like “z” (with).

e.g., Anna jedzie samochodem. (Anna drives a car - “car” is in instrumental case).

The main function of the accusative is for the object of the sentence. But, it can also be used with some prepositions.

e.g., Anna ma kota. (Anna has a cat - ”cat” is an object of the sentence and it is in accusative case).

The dative is used as the indirect object.

e.g., Anna daje kotu mleko. (Anna gives milk to a cat - “cat” is in dative case).

The genitive is a very important case in Polish.  It means possession.

e.g., Poznałem brata Anny. (I met Anna’s brother - “brother” is in genitive case).

Declension of nouns and adjectives is highly irregular and often must be memorized. 

POLISH VERBS

Generally, the infinitive form of Polish verbs ends in ”-ć” eg., pić - to drink; mieszkać - to live, etc. Almost all Polish verbs occur in two major categories that are called aspects.  There are two aspects of verbs in Polish language: perfective and imperfective.  The perfective aspect of verb describes an action that is already finished or will be completed in future. The imperfective aspect of verbs describes the action that “is, was or will” take place in some moment. The verbs form the pairs. The perfective aspect of verb derives usually from imperfective verb’s root by adding a prefix or suffix to it.

 e.g., imperfective – ”pić” and perfective ”wypić” to drink.

Polish verbs have several conjugational patterns that need to be memorized. The endings of the verbs depend on subject’s number and gender and conjugational pattern.

There are three common conjugational patterns in Polish language which are referd as ”ę, -esz”, ”-ę, -isz/-ysz”, ”-am, - asz or -em, -esz” conjugations. 

Below are some examples of conjugation of Polish verbs in preset tense.