Mother Language Day

 

Today UNESCO is celebrating International Mother Language Day so I’ve decided to introduce you to my native language which is Polish.

For a start, this is its genealogy:

 

* This is just a simple sketch, hundreds more languages are not included

 

As you can see, Polish is an Indo-European language. Probably 99% of its vocabulary is European with the remaining 1% being comprised of, above all, Arabic and  Turkish words which can be found in English, for example.

 

Here’s some facts:

• it is spoken by more than 41 million people around the world
• it is one of the 25 most widely spoken languages
• it is a Slavonic language, most closely related to Czech, Slovak, Kashubian and Sorbian
• it is written using the Latin alphabet (with some modifications to adapt it to the many sounds Latin didn’t have)
• it utilises diacritics (ą, ę, ó, ł, ż, ź, ć, ń) and digraphs (sz, cz, ch, dż, dź, dz)
• letters q, x and v appear only in foreign words
• it has seven grammatical cases
• it has three tenses but many verbs can have perfective and imperfective forms
• it is the only Slavonic language that still has nasal vowels (ą and ę, despite its appearance, the former is a nasal o)
• consonant clusters are quite common (eg. wszcznij)
• it is the official language of Poland and one of the official languages of the EU
• it was once considered the lingua franca of Eastern Europe
• stress is fixed on the penultimate syllable
• the first text in Polish dates back to the 14th century
• arguably the most famous Polish tongue-twister is this one: ‘W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie’
• for native speakers, it is very easy to read written Polish
• quite the opposite applies to writing it
• there is a huge number of rules regarding where to place commas, separating or joining compound words, capitalising or not, which is impossible to know them all
• Polish Language Council is responsible setting these rules as well as approving correct declination and conjugation
• there are strict rules on giving names to babies, one of these rules says that the name must indicate sex of the child
• despite the fact that it’s spoken over a relatively vast area, it doesn’t have many dialectal differences and accent variations
• Polish has borrowed words from many languages, mostly from Latin, Czech, German, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and English
• like many other languages in Europe, Polish is now facing threat due to the dominant position or English
• foreign films are neither dubbed nor do they have subtitles, voice-over is used instead (the worst out of these three options, in my opinion)
• kurwa is the most widely used swear word
• the longest proper word in Polish is pięćdziesięciogroszówka which means fifty groszy coin
• ‘Pan Tadeusz’ is considered the national epic poem of Poland. It begins with the words: ‘Litwo, ojczyzno moja!’ (‘Oh, Lithuania, my fatherland’)
• and of course, it is the most beautiful language in the world :)

 

 

And what do the Poles think of their language? Here are the results of a poll conducted by the Polish Language Council and CBOS in 2005

In your opinion, why should we take care of the language we use?
1) because Polish is a value which holds the nation together and one should preserve it	35,4%
2) because I was taught at home that one should take care of their native language	19,4%
3) because cultured people should speak correctly	19,5%
4) because speaking correctly helps in communication	12,3%
5) because when one speaks incorrectly, others treat this person worse	4,3%
6) you just should, I cannot justify it well	8,4%
7) difficult to say	0,6%
8) because our language is beautiful	0,1%