Polish language

Polish  (język polski, polszczyzna) is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. It is the second most spoken Slavic language after Russian. It is spoken by ethnic Poles in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, United States, and Canada.

The seven main dialects of the Polish language are: Greater Polish, spoken in the west; Mazovian, spoken in the central and eastern Poland; Lesser Polish, spoken in the south and southeast; Northern Kresy, spoken mainly by Polish minority in Lithuania and Belarus; Southern Kresy, spoken in Red Ruthenia in the Middle Ages and often considered a descendant of a pidgin of the Polish language and Old Ruthenian language; Silesian, spoken in the southwest, and Kashubian, spoken in the region of Eastern Pomerania, are often considered independent languages.

The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics, such as kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent), kropka (superior dot) and ogonek ("little tail"). The Polish alphabet was one of two major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Slavic languages, the other being Czech orthography. Slovak uses the Czech-based system, as do Slovene and Croatian; Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, while Sorbian blends the two.

The letters Q, V, and X do not exist in the Polish alphabet, but they are used in some commercial names and foreign words. Some letters are used but not very often. Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs: ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, and sz.

The basic syntax in Polish is subject-verb-object. However, as it is a synthetic language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, drop the subject, object or even verb, if they are obvious from context.

Polish is a highly inflected language. It retains the Old Slavic case system with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, which are: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative.

Modern Polish has only singular and plural number classes. In the past there was also a dual number, which applied only to pairs. This form vanished around the 15th century and now only its traces remain. Like many other Slavic languages, there are no definite or indefinite articles in Polish.

The Polish gender system is a combination of three categories: gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personhood (personal and non-personal), and animacy (animate and inanimate). Personhood and animacy are relevant only within the masculine gender. The resulting system can be said to be having five gender classes: personal masculine, animate (non-personal) masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. These classes can be identified based on declension patterns, adjective-noun agreement, and pronoun-antecedent agreement.

Polish inflects verbs according to gender, person, and number. In Polish, there are three tenses (present, past, and future), three moods (indicative, imperative, and conditional), and three voices (active, passive, and reflexive).

Info: Wikipedia