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several more distinctive ethnic types are shown in Figure 1.
Polish, the official language, serves as the mother tongue of about 99% of the country's inhabitants, ranking seventh among European languages in number of native speakers. Outside of Poland, it is used to some extent by several million Polish emigrants scattered throughout the world, representing one of their main ties with the motherland. In modern times the Polish language has achieved importance as an instrument of both literary and scholarly expression.
Along with Czech, Slovak, and Lusatian (Wendish), Polish belongs to the Western division of the Slavic (Slavonic) language group, which is in turn a member of the Eastern division of the Indo-European family. Despite the considerable uniformity in vocabulary and grammatical pattern that characterizes the Slavic tongues, Polish is not readily comprehensible to other Slavic speakers. Its distinctive features include fixed accent on the penultimate syllable, frequent occurrence of palatal and sibilant sounds, and preservation of archaic Slavic nasal vowels. In common with other Slavic tongues whose speakers chose the Roman Catholic rather than the Eastern Orthodox form of Christianity, Polish in its written form uses the Latin alphabet.
Regional dialects and subdialects, although numerous, cause few practical difficulties in intercommunication. The flat character of the country has been instrumental in checking the emergence of strong dialectal differences, while local language peculiarities have practically disappeared since World War I through such leveling influences as public education, mass media, urbanization, and internal migration. Authorities do not always agree on the classification of Polish dialects and subdialects, but all recognize three major groupings: 1) Great Polish (Wielkopolski), with Poznan[1] as the center; 2) Little Polish (Malopolski), with Krakow as the center; and 3) Mazovian (Mazowiecki), with Warsaw as the center. A transitional central area among these three groups is located north, west, and south of Lodz.
The most distinctive dialect is Kashubian, considered by some scholars to be a subdialect of Pomeranian and by others to be a separate West Slavic language; it is spoken by a relatively small group (estimated between 100,000 and 250,000) inhabiting an area along the Baltic Coast west of the Vistula. In Silesia the older generation of indigenous people speak a highly Germanized form of Polish.
FIGURE 1. Polish ethnic types (U/OU) (photos)
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- ↑ For diacritics on place names see the list of names at the end of the chapter.
