Polish

When Polish was first written

Polish began to form as a distinct language around the 10th century, as the Polish state took shape, and it was only spoken until the Latin alphabet arrived with baptism in 966. The Book of Henryków holds the earliest known sentence, written around 1280: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai, an offer to take over the grinding so that the other person can rest. The monk who recorded it noted "Hoc est in polonico", this is in Polish. The book was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World list in 2015.

Jakub Parkosz wrote the first treatise on Polish spelling around 1470. The first printed book followed in 1508 or 1513, and the first newspaper in 1661. The writing system took its overall form in the 16th century and was revised in the 19th century and in 1936. Standard Polish rests mainly on the Greater Poland dialects, and after the Second World War it replaced most village dialects in everyday speech.

How Polish spells its sounds

The kreska marks ć, ń, ó, ś and ź, a stroke crosses the ł, a dot sits over ż, and the ogonek hangs under ą and ę. Q, v and x appear only in foreign words. Spelling is largely phonemic, but some sounds have two spellings, which can change the meaning: może is "maybe" and morze is "sea". The same sound can be written ś, si or s depending on what follows, as in święty, siarka and siwy. Poland's Lipka Tatars once wrote Polish in Arabic letters, and some speakers in western Belarus still use Cyrillic, mainly for religious texts.

Where Polish is spoken outside Poland

Nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish their first language, a homogeneity that dates from the border changes and population transfers after 1945. Minorities remain in Lithuania, where 26% of Vilnius County used Polish in the 2001 census, and in western Belarus and Ukraine. The 2011 census of England and Wales found over 500,000 people whose main language was Polish, and the 2000 United States census counted 667,414 speakers at home.

Polish has lent words in turn. German Grenze, "border", comes from granica, English sable from soból, and gherkin, through German Gurke, from ogórek. Pierogi is already plural in Polish.