Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group within the Indo-European language family written in the Latin script. It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals.
A caron is a diacritic mark placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
The first Slovak orthography was proposed by Anton Bernolák (1762–1813) in his Dissertatio philologico-critica de litteris Slavorum, used in the six-volume Slovak-Czech-Latin-German-Hungarian Dictionary (1825–1927) and used primarily by Slovak Catholics.
Ze is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
The history of the Slavic languages stretches over 3000 years, from the point at which the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language broke up into the modern-day Slavic languages which are today natively spoken in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe as well as parts of North Asia and Central Asia.
In linguistics, assibilation is a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is a form of spirantization and is commonly the final phase of palatalization.
The phonological system of the Polish language is similar in many ways to those of other Slavic languages, although there are some characteristic features found in only a few other languages of the family, such as contrasting postalveolar and alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates. The vowel system is relatively simple, with just six oral monophthongs and arguably two nasals in traditional speech, while the consonant system is much more complex.
Polish orthography is the system of writing the Polish language. The language is written using the Polish alphabet, which derives from the Latin alphabet, but includes some additional letters with diacritics. The orthography is mostly phonetic, or rather phonemic—the written letters correspond in a consistent manner to the sounds, or rather the phonemes, of spoken Polish. For detailed information about the system of phonemes, see Polish phonology.
The phonological system of the modern Belarusian language consists of at least 44 phonemes: 5 vowels and 39 consonants. Consonants may also be geminated. There is no absolute agreement on the number of phonemes; rarer or contextually variant sounds are included by some scholars.
The modern Latvian orthography is based on Latin script adapted to phonetic principles, following the pronunciation of the language. The standard alphabet consists of 33 letters – 22 unmodified Latin letters and 11 modified by diacritics. It was developed by the Knowledge Commission of the Riga Latvian Association in 1908, and was approved the same year by the orthography commission under the leadership of Kārlis Mīlenbahs and Jānis Endzelīns. It was introduced by law from 1920 to 1922 in the Republic of Latvia.
The Lwów dialect is a subdialect (gwara) of the Polish language characteristic of the inhabitants of the then Polish city of Lviv, now in Ukraine. Based on the substratum of the Lesser Polish dialect, it was heavily influenced by borrowings from other languages spoken in Galicia, notably Ukrainian (Ruthenian), German and Yiddish,
Polish dialects are regional vernacular varieties of the Polish language, and often show developments starting from an earlier stage of the language, often Old Polish or Middle Polish, namely the development of the so-called "pitched" or "slanted" vowels.
Mazurzenie or mazuration is the replacement or merger of Polish's series of postalveolar fricatives and affricates into the dentialveolar series. This merger is present in many dialects, but is named for the Masovian dialect.
The following list is a comparison of basic Proto-Slavic vocabulary and the corresponding reflexes in the modern languages, for assistance in understanding the discussion in Proto-Slavic and History of the Slavic languages. The word list is based on the Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, a tool to study the evolution of languages via comparison, containing a set of 207 basic words which can be found in every language and are rarely borrowed. However, the words given as the modern versions are not necessarily the normal words with the given meaning in the various modern languages, but the words directly descended from the corresponding Proto-Slavic word. The list here is given both in the orthography of each language, with accent marks added as necessary to aid in pronunciation and Proto-Slavic reconstruction. See below for a capsule summary of how to pronounce each language, as well as some discussion of the conventions used.
This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Slovak language.
Palatalization is a historical-linguistic sound change that results in a palatalized articulation of a consonant or, in certain cases, a front vowel. Palatalization involves change in the place or manner of articulation of consonants, or the fronting or raising of vowels. In some cases, palatalization involves assimilation or lenition.
Podlachian language is an East Slavic literary microlanguage based on the East Slavic dialects spoken by inhabitants of the southern part of Podlachian Province in Poland between the Narew (north) and Bug (south) rivers. The native speakers of these dialects usually refer to them by the adverbial term po-svojomu. The unequivocal academic classification of the po-svojomu dialects has been disputed for many years among linguists as well as activists of ethnic minorities in Podlachia, who classify them as either Belarusian dialects with Ukrainian traits or Ukrainian dialects.
Northern Borderlands dialect is a dialect of the Polish language, spoken by the Polish minorities in Lithuania and in northwestern Belarus.
The Eastern Lublin dialect belongs to the Lesser Poland dialect group and is located in the part of Poland. It borders the Western Lublin dialect to the west, the Lasovia dialect to the southwest, the Przemyśl dialect to the south, the Southern Borderlands dialect to the east, the Northern Borderlands dialect to the northeast, the Masovian Podlachia dialect to the north, and the Near Mazovian dialect to the northwest.
