Polish Legal Translator

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About the Polish Language

Polish is the official language of Poland and is the most widely spoken Western Slavic language and the second largest Slavic language after Russian.

Today, Polish is spoken by over 38.5 million people as their first language in Poland. Millions of Polish speakers can be found in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Scotland and so on. There are over 50 million Polish language speakers around the world.

The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the Soviet annexation of the Kresy (Eastern Borderlands) in 1939, and the annexation of former German territory after World War II. This tendency toward a homogeneity also stems from the vertically integrated nature of the Polish People's Republic.

The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standardized Polish appear relatively slight. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing regional variations.

Polish is normally described as consisting of four or five main dialects:

• Greater Polish, spoken in the west
• Lesser Polish, spoken in the south and southeast
• Masovian, spoken throughout the central and eastern parts of the country
• Silesian, spoken in the southwest

Kashubian, spoken in Pomerania west of Gdańsk on the Baltic Sea, is often considered a fifth dialect. It contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs. the five of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages. However, it "lacks most of the linguistic and social determinants of language-hood".