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Polish Newspapers & Magazines
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Introduction into the Polish language
2005/08/24
Original Article Date: unknown
- Kashubian -spoken by estimately 100 to over 200 thousand people living west of Gdansk, near the Baltic Sea;
- Lower Sorbian, used by about 20-30 thousand people in the Cottbus region (Germany);
- Upper Sorbian (closer to Czech), spoken by 60-90 thousand inhabitants of the Bautzen region (Germany);
- Czech;
- Slovak.
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Polish is a Slavic language that belongs to the West Slavic subgroup.
The Western branch of Slavic languages, which are most closely related to Polish is formed as follow:
History of the polish language
In the early Middle Ages the proto Slavonic tribes left their original lands between the Odra and Dnieper rivers and settled down in almost entire central, east and south Europe. They reached the Elba in the west, the Volga and Dvina in the east and the Balkan Peninsula in the south. This expansion resulted in the emergence of three groups of Slavonic languages: west, south and east.
The Polish language started to develop around the 10th century. It was a parallel process to the establishment and development of the Polish state by Mieszko I, who united number of culturally and linguistically related tribes from the basins of the Vistula and Odra. After accepting baptism in 966 by Mieszko I, the Polish language also adopted the Latin alphabet, which made it possible to write in Polish, as until that time the language existed only in its spoken form.
Polish literature beginns in the 14th century with written texts in Polish as translations of Latin prayers and sermons rendered. The most famous texts of medival Polish are Kazania S'wie;tokrzyskie and the hymn of Bogurodzica (God's Mother). Bogurodzica was written in the 15th century, but its archaic vocabulary and the fact that already at that time it had been known for long seem to prove that it must have been composed centuries earlier.
The first secular texts began to appear in the 13th century. The first attempt to codify the rules of the Polish language was made around the 15th century and at the same time Polish started to be used in legal documents and court books. The Polish language acquired literary status by individual writers in the 16th century, and in the 17th-18th centuries was recognized as a language of education, science, public debate etc. The first Polish dictionary was compiled only at the beginning of the 19th century. The six-volume work by Samuel Bogumil Linde was published in Warsaw and contained the definitions of 60,000 Polish words.
Further development and influence by other languages
Through centuries Polish has been influenced by contact with other languages, mostly by Latin, German, Czech, French, Italian, Russian and English.
Poland was christianized by missionaires from Czech lands and so the Polish language incorporated many Czech loan words. Latin borrowings came later, more through scholar and humanistic influences than for religious reasons. Today the Latin influence is limited mainly to scientific terminology.
German influences begin in the medival times when its speakers pushed eastwards into Polish territories. The German defeat at Tannenberg in East Prussia in 1410 ended this episode, however the German language also continued to play an important role in Poland.
The period of greatest impact of French was the 18th century, when this language was spoken by aristocracy and those who wanted to be regarded as educated and well-travelled.
During the period of Poland's partition 1795-1918 (between Russia, Prussia and Austria) as a result of the policies of Germanization and Russification, Polish borrowed many words from those languages. Another wave of Russian borrowings came after the Second World War when Poland became vassalized by the Soviet Union.
Despite the Russian influences, the Polish language in post-war decades has been dominated by English. Since the late 60s the number of borrowings from that language has increased steadily and in the 90s Polish became flooded by loanwords from English.
Dialects
There are several dialects of the Polish language, the most remarkable of which are Great Polish ( in the northwest, dialect of Gniezno), Little Polish ( in the southeast, dialect of Cracow), Mazovian ( dialect of Warsaw) and Silesian.
The distribution of dialects is a remaining feature from the times when every Slavonic tribe was using its own language. Over centuries the languages of certain tribes have been developing and changing. Each dialect has several varieties which differ from the Polish language in vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation and morphology.To give some examples, in several areas of Poland fe. in Silesian dialect nasal consonants are pronounced without nasal resonance while in others the sound may be nasalized (Mazovian dialect); inflection endings used in dialects have preserved some features of archaic Polish (Little Polis dialect); there are also tendencies in inflection simplifications and reducing the number of endings. Other dialectal special features are local words connected with farming which are no longer or have never been used in standard Polish.
An interesting feature occured as a consequence of the mass migration process after 1945. Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union moved to the western and northern part of Poland bringing with them a dialect characteristic for the former eastern provinces. Furthermore, due to the policy of the socialist government that aimed in surpressing the development of local communities, thousands of people were forced to move within the country. The process of mixing of various communities resulted in an emergence of new, mixed dialects and lead to more homogenity in standard Polish. Contemporary standard Polish, based mainly on the Warsaw variant of language, is spoken or at least understood in the whole country.
Here you can listen to the "Goral" dialect of the high south mountains in the philosophical prose of ks. Jozef Tischner.
Geographic distribution
Polish is spoken by about 43-60 million people of whom some 36.5 million speakers live in Poland, where it is the official language.
Fourteen to seventeen million Poles are estimated to live abroad. The three largest communities of Polish emigrants are in the United States (6-10 million) Germany (about 1.5 million), Brasil (about 1 million), France (about 1 million), Canada (about 600 000). A strong Polish minority remains in Lithuania (250 000) western Belarus (400 000- 1 million) and Ukraine (300 000-500 000), where the Polish language until 18th century was the language of elite. Lesser numbers in the United Kingdom (about 150,000), Australia (130,000-180,000), Argentina (100,000-170,000), Russia (about 100,000), the Czech Republic (70,000-100,000) and Kazakhstan (60,000-100,000).
This large number of Polish emigrants and foreigners who declare themselves of Polish descent (17 million is about 40% of Poland's current population) is a result of complex historical processes. First big emigration wave took place in the late 18th century when Poland disappeared from Europe's maps, partitioned by Russia, Austria and Prussia.
The last great wave of emigration hit Poland after the Second World War, when the country became ruled by Moscow-backed communists -between 1956 and 1980 about 800,000 people moved to the USA and West European countries.
Source: European Centre of Modern Languages,
Introduction into the Polish language
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Current Article:
2006/01/09
Poland's New Gov't Recalls 10 Ambassadors
(AP) Poland's new conservative government will recall 10 ambassadors with links to communist-era authorities, the first such sweeping move in 16 years of democracy, the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
Foreign Minister Stefan Meller decided to cut short the ambassadors' missions amid a broader attempt by the new government to purge state offices of ex-communists, ministry spokesman Pawel Dobrowolski told The Associated Press.
Recent Articles:
2006/01/02
Poland set for Baltic air patrols
Poland has become the first former Warsaw Pact country to take responsibility for patrolling the air space of the three Baltic states.
Polish pilots took over the rotating Nato mission from the US at a ceremony in northern Lithuania. Seventy Polish air force personnel will serve there.
2005/12/26
Poland's new president is sworn in
WARSAW Lech Kaczynski was sworn in as Poland's new president Friday, crowning the rise of new conservative leaders who pledge to fight corruption, talk tough to Russia and distance the country from its communist past.
In his first remarks after taking the oath of office, Kaczynski said Poland would keep its strong relationship with the United States and pledged to make troubled ties with Russia \"an important issue\" for his presidency.
2005/12/19
Poland to examine claims of secret CIA jails
The Polish government is launching an inquiry into whether the country hosted Central Intelligence Agency prisons on its territory, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the prime minister, announced on Monday.
The charge by US-based Human Rights Watch that the US intelligence agency kept prisoners accused of terrorism in Poland has been consistently rejected by Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish president.
2005/12/12
Poland was main CIA European detention base: paper
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland was the heart of the CIA's secret detention network in Europe until recently, an analyst of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch organization was quoted as telling a Polish newspaper.
\"Poland was the main base for CIA interrogations in Europe, while Romania played more of a role in the transfer of detained prisoners,\" analyst Marc Garlasco was quoted on Friday by Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza as saying in an interview.
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