Polish

About Polish

Polish is the official language of Poland and the first language of about 40 million people. It is a West Slavic language, close to Czech and Slovak, and there are large Polish-speaking communities in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Canada.

To be polite, Poles address strangers as Pan (sir) or Pani (madam) with the verb in the third person, and keep ty for friends and family. Stress almost always falls on the second-to-last syllable. Spellings that look hard are regular: w sounds like v, ł like the w in "win", cz like ch, sz like sh. Both rz and ż sound like the s in "measure". The vowels ą and ę are nasal.

FamilyIndo-European, West Slavic
Native speakersabout 40 million (2019)
Official inPoland
ScriptLatin alphabet with letters such as ą, ę, ł, ó, ś and ż
Codespl (ISO 639-1), pol (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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