Polish Translations

POZENA’s professional Polish translations

• Polski is a member of the West Slavic subgroup, a branch of the Slavic languages (it is the second most commonly spoken language in this group after Russian). The emergence of Polish as a separate language coincided with the origins of the Polish statehood in the 10th century. The first written attestation of Polish dates from the 13th century. The Polish language was in its heyday from the 16th to the early 18th century when it was the dominant language of Central and Eastern Europe, largely thanks to the political and cultural impact of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 19th century, when Poland was annexed by Russia, Prussia and Austria, its language served as an important identity marker in the struggle against the occupants.
• Compared to other languages, Polish is relatively homogenous, displaying moderate dialectal variation, with regional differences (mostly phonological, and to a smaller degree lexical) gradually losing in importance after World War II. The language consists of four major dialects: Greater Polish (Wielkopolski), Lesser Polish (Małopolski), Silesian (Śląski), which is sometimes regarded as a distinct language, and Masovian (Mazowiecki). Polish is most closely related to Kashubian (an ethnic-minority language spoken at home by around 100 thousand people in the northern province of Pomerania), Slovak and Czech.
• Currently, Polish is regulated by the Polish Language Council, a body of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Arts.
• Polish is an official language of the EU.

• Being a Slavic language, Polish is highly inflectional. Nouns, pronouns and adjectives are declined for seven cases, two numbers and three genders (though within the masculine gender, there is a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns). Polish also has a very rich verbal morphology with various forms to express the categories of tense, mood and aspect.
• Word stress in Polish is fixed and falls on the penultimate syllable (however, there are some exceptions).
• Throughout its history, Polish has adopted words from various languages. In its early days, it borrowed vocabulary from other Slavic languages (primarily Czech) and German, later on from Italian and French, and, in recent decades, from English.
• Some Polish words have entered other languages. The German Grenze, derived from the Polish granica (Eng. border), is a good case in point. Some culinary loanwords, especially pierogi and kielbasa, are becoming increasingly common in the English-speaking world. A less obvious example of a Polish loanword is the English noun spruce, which originated from the Polish name Prusy (Eng. Prussia), more specifically from the phrase z Prus (Eng. from Prussia).
• The longest Polish word is the 32-letter noun konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka (‘the unmarried daughter of a man from Constantinople’). The word is no longer in use, though, as the city of Constantinople is now called Istanbul. Besides, such kinship and marital status distinctions in Polish are becoming obsolete.