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The famous Gdansk shipyard

Welcome to the Polish Language program website at Syracuse University. Polish has been taught in the department of Language, Literature and Linguistics since 2003. Currently we are pleased to offer Pol101/102 (beginning Polish) and Pol 201/202 (intermediate Polish).

Polish language is the official language of Poland, where 97% of the 38 million citizens declare it as their mother tongue. Outside of Poland, the language is spoken in the former Soviet Union territories (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Russia), and also in France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Israel, New Zealand, Slovakia, UK, and the United States. In the United States 0.25% of the population declares Polish as their language spoken at home. The biggest concentration of people of Polish descent in the US is in the Chicago and New York City areas.

The Polish language is classified as the Lechitic branch of the Western Slavic languages. The simplified genetic classification could be presented as follows: Indo-European › Balto-Slavic › Slavic › West Slavic › Lechitic › Polish.

Throughout its history, Polish has been greatly influenced by other foreign languages, especially Russian, German, French, and Italian. In recent years it has been profoundly subjected to the influence of American English.

Polish is possibly one of the most difficult languages for a non-Slavic speaker to learn. The language vowel system consists of 8 vowels including 2 nasal vowels: ą and ę. (Polish is the only Slavic language that has preserved its nasal vowels). The consonant system is a little more complicated, because it features series of palatal consonants and of affricates such as: sz, cz, rz, szcz, ś, ź, ż, etc.

Furthermore, the language has a compound gender system with five genders: feminine, neuter and three masculine genders–personal, animate and inanimate. There are 7 cases and 2 numbers. Polish nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected. Paradigms of noun declension as well as of verb conjugation are extremely irregular. Every verb expresses aspect and may thus be either perfective or imperfective.

The basic word order in Polish sentence is SVO. However, it is possible to shift words around the sentence, and to drop the subject, the object or the verb, if these constituents are obvious from the previous context. For example, all sentences listed below have the same meaning (‘Mother loves (her) son’).

1. Matka kocha syna.
2. Matka syna kocha.
3. Syna kocha matka.
4. Kocha matka syna.
5. Syna matka kocha.
6. Kocha syna matka.