Languages

Polish

POL-skee

Also Known As polski

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "Polish." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/polish.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). Polish. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/polish

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-polish,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {Polish},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/polish},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Polish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland, written in the Latin alphabet with a set of diacritics that mark sounds the plain Latin letters do not cover. It preserves a system of nasal vowels and a fixed penultimate stress that most of its Slavic relatives have lost.

Facts

ISO 639-3 Code

pl 1

Speaker Count

40,000,000 1

Figure is for first-language speakers in Poland; a substantial diaspora, chiefly in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, adds several million more heritage speakers of varying fluency not counted here.

Status

Living 1

Region

Poland (official); minority communities in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine; diaspora in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Australia, United Kingdom, United States 2

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Latin

This source names Latin directly: "language of Poland, written in the Latin alphabet with a set of diacritics that mark sounds the plain Latin letters do not cover."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)