Polish language
The Polish language is the official one of Poland. It is the most spoken West Slavic language.
Statistics about Polish
Today the Polish language is the official one of Poland; most of 38 million inhabitants of Poland speak Polish (census 2002). In western Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, there are also some native speakers of Polish. People from Poland has emigrated in various periods, therefore, millions of Polish-speakers may be found in countries such as Ireland, Brazil, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, United States, etc. 10 million of Polish people, approximately, live beyond the borders of Poland. It is difficult to know, however, how many of them can actually speak Polish - the estimates range from 3,5 to 10 million. 40 and 48 million would speak Polish, according these estimations.. Ethnologue claim that there are about 43 million first language speakers of Polish worldwide.
After Russian, Polish is the most commonly spoken among Slavic languages. It is the most important representative of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages. Polish originated in the areas of actual Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland. It shares some vocabulary with Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.
-Translation Polish-
Borrowed words of the Polish language
Over the centuries, the Polish language has borrowed many words from other ones, but they have been usually rapidly adapted in the two following ways:
Their spelling was frequently altered to approximately keep the pronunciation, but have them written according to Polish phonetics.
Word endings are liberally applied to almost any word to produce nouns , adjectives, verbs ,as well as adding the appropriate endings for cases of diminutives, augmentatives nouns, etc.
The Polish language has borrowed from various languages, depending on the historical period,. Nowadays, borrowing is mostly of "international" words from the English language, principally those that have Latin or Greek roots. Sometimes, slang borrows and alters common English words, but these borrowings are usually used in a short period of time, going out of fashion after some years. Concatenation of parts of words (e.g. tele-auto), that is not characteristic of the Polish language, but common in English, is also sometimes used.
The Polish language often changes their spelling when borrowing international words. For instance, Latin suffix '-tion' corresponds to –cja, while -cja becomes -cje to make the word plural.
Other important influences in the past have been Latin (9th-18th century), Czech (10th and 14th-15th century), Italian (15th-16th century), French (18th-19th century), German (13-14th and 19th century, Hungarian (14th-16th century), Turkish (17th century), Russian, Ukrainian and Old Belarusian.
As a result of being neighbours for a millennium, the Polish language has borrowed a lot of from the German language. This is also due to a significant German population in Polish cities since the medieval times.
Most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries knew Latin to a larger or smaller degree. This language continued to be extensively taught at secondary schools until World War II. Its influence can also be seen in a lot of verbatim Latin sentences in Polish literature (principally from the 19th century and earlier), than, say, in English apart from dozens of loanwords,
With rising prominence of France in Europe, in the 18th century, the French language supplanted Latin in this respect. Some French borrowings also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Polish people were fervent supporters of Napoleon.
The mountain dialects of the Górale in the South of Poland, have many words borrowed from the Hungarian language and the Romanian language from historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians.
Some word are related to thieves' slang of Greek origin, considered then unknown to the outside world.
Some words borrowed directly from the Russian language are extremely rare, in spite of long periods of dependence on tzarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and are limited to few internationalisms.
Some ressources for translating Polish: