The Polish Polish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner throughout most of Poland vowel In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A system is relatively simple with only six oral and two nasal vowels. All Polish oral vowels are monophthongs A monophthong is a "pure" vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation; compare diphthong, which are shown to the right. The /ɨ/ (spelt ‹y›) and /i/ (spelt ‹i›) have largely complementary distributions. Except for after labial Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). English [m] is a bilabial nasal sonorant, [b] and [p] are bilabial stops (plosives), [v] and [f] are labiodental fricatives consonants, which can be followed by both /ɨ/ and /i/, /i/ is usually pronounced when word-initial and after palatal Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate . Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex and alveolo-palatal In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar fricatives, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate. They are similar to palato-alveolar and retroflex fricatives, but are laminal rather than apical or sub-apical as the retroflex fricatives are, consonants, while /ɨ/ appears elsewhere (see Soft vs. hard consonants below). In some phonological descriptions of Polish that phonemically distinguish labials Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). English [m] is a bilabial nasal sonorant, [b] and [p] are bilabial stops (plosives), [v] and [f] are labiodental fricatives with palatalization The second may be the result of the first, but they often differ. A vowel may "palatalize" a consonant , but the result might not be a palatalized consonant in the phonetic sense (sense 2), or the phonetically palatalized (sense 2) consonant may occur irrespective of front vowels, /ɨ/ and /i/ can be treated as allophones In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds (phones) that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word. Speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a distinctive sound in that language. An. The vowels /ɨ/ and /i/ also rhyme in Polish poetry.

Similar allophony, though finer, applies to certain other vowels. Next to a soft consonant, and especially between two soft consonants or between a soft consonant and /j/, /ɛ/ is often near-close ([e]) and /a/ is more front (that is, cardinal Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. For instance, the vowel of the English word "feet" can be described with reference to cardinal vowel 1, [i], which is the cardinal vowel closest to it [a] rather than [ä]).^[1] These distinctions are not represented in the spelling and native speakers are mostly not aware of the differences.

While other Slavic languages have lost the Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages as well as other Indo-European languages nasal vowels A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. The term stands in opposition to the term "oral vowel" refers to an ordinary vowel without this nasalisation. Note that these terms can be slightly misleading as the air does not come exclusively out of the, they are preserved in Polish.

Unlike those in French French is a Romance language globally spoken by about 110 million people as a first language (mother tongue), by 190 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant numbers of speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France, where the language, nasal vowels A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. The term stands in opposition to the term "oral vowel" refers to an ordinary vowel without this nasalisation. Note that these terms can be slightly misleading as the air does not come exclusively out of the in Polish often consist of an oral vowel followed by a nasal semivowel (so that Polish są is pronounced [sɔw̃] like Portuguese são rather than French sont; all of which mean, 'they are'),^[2] or, before stops and affricates, by a nasal consonant homorganic with the following stop or affricate (e.g. kąt is pronounced [ˈkɔnt], gęba pronounced [ˈɡɛmba], ręka pronounced [ˈrɛŋka], piszący [pʲiˈʂɔnt͡sɨ], pieniądze [pʲeˈɲɔnd͡zɛ], pięć [ˈpʲeɲt͡ɕ], jęczy [ˈjɛnt͡ʂɨ]).^[3]

Other nasal nuclei exist in loanwords, though such words are in free variation with the typical diphthongal pronunciation (e.g. instynkt [iw̃stɨŋkt~instɨŋkt] 'instinct').^[4] Similarly, the palatal nasal [ɲ] in coda position is in free variation with a nasalized palatal approximant [ȷ̃].^[3] The majority of speakers denasalize word-final /ɛ̃/.^{[citation needed]}

The length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, of a vowel is not phonemic In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances in Polish, which means that how long a vowel is pronounced does not change the meaning of a word.

This was not the case in Proto-West-Slavic (including Proto-Polish), which reintroduced the full distinction of vowel lengths as a result of yer The letter yer of the Cyrillic alphabet, also spelled jer or er, is known as the hard sign (твёрдый знак [ˈtvʲor.dɨj znak]) in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets and as er golyam (ер голям, "big er") in the Bulgarian alphabet. The letter is called back yer (ер обратный) in the pre-reform Russian vocalization/disappearance. (The distinction had been almost lost in the Late Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages as well as other Indo-European languages period.) Yers were two weak vowels — the so called hard yer (ъ) and the soft yer (ь), which either disappeared or turned into other vowels. If the yer (or another vowel) disappeared, then the preceding vowel became long (unless the preceding vowel was also a yer, because then it turned into a short e). All other vowels became short (except for yers, again, which disappeared in the respective positions). No matter what happened to it, soft yer The soft sign , also known as (the front) yer, is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels. In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems ( usually palatalized The second may be the result of the first, but they often differ. A vowel may "palatalize" a consonant , but the result might not be a palatalized consonant in the phonetic sense (sense 2), or the phonetically palatalized (sense 2) consonant may occur irrespective of front vowels the preceding consonant. Example:

'day' in nominative The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. (Generally, it is a noun that is doing something.): *dьnь → dzień 'day' in instrumental The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an abstract concept: *dьnьmъ → dniem

The system of new vowel lengths is well preserved in Czech Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian and to a lesser degree in Slovak The Slovak language ( slovenský jazyk , slovenčina , not to be confused with slovenščina, or Slovenian), is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages (together with Czech, Polish, Silesian, Kashubian, and Sorbian). In the emerging modern Polish, long vowels were shortened again but simultaneously became higher—apart from the vowels which were already high, like i and u. Typical for the spoken dialects, this shift was finally incorporated into the standard language only in the case of long o and the long nasal vowel, mostly for the vowels located before voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate. This is its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which obstruents An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract. In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants. The vowel shift may be presented like this:

long a → short a (certain dialects: o) long e → short e (certain dialects: y or i) long y or i → short y or i long o → short /u/, written <ó> long u → short /u/, written <u> long /ã/ → short /ɔ̃/, written <ą>

Note that the u which was once a long o is still distinguished in script as <ó>. Former long e was written <é> until the nineteenth century whereas <á> for long a became disused sooner. Present-day /ɛ̃/, was derived from the earlier short /ã/. The medieval /ã/—both long and short—written as <ø>, was derived from the merged nasal *ę and *ǫ of Late Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages as well as other Indo-European languages (they have merged but *ę has left its trace by palatalizing the preceding consonant). Therefore, the contemporary Polish distinction of /ɛ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ does not continue the Proto-Slavic distinction.

As another result of the long vowel shift, alternations o:ó and ę:ą permeate the contemporary word inflection and derivation. Examples:

'corner' in nominative The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. (Generally, it is a noun that is doing something.): *rogъ → róg 'corner' in instrumental The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an abstract concept: *rogъmъ → rogiem

'oak' in nominative The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. (Generally, it is a noun that is doing something.): *dãbъ → dąb 'oak' in instrumental The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an abstract concept: *dãbъmъ → dębem

Consonants

The Polish Polish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner throughout most of Poland consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], which are noisy ; and [m] and [n], which system is more complicated and its characteristic features are the series of affricates Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative (such as [s] or [z] or occasionally into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel and palatal Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate . Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages as well as other Indo-European languages palatalizations The second may be the result of the first, but they often differ. A vowel may "palatalize" a consonant , but the result might not be a palatalized consonant in the phonetic sense (sense 2), or the phonetically palatalized (sense 2) consonant may occur irrespective of front vowels and two further palatalizations which took place in Polish and Belarusian The Belarusian language, or the Belarusan is the language of the Belarusian people and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Prior to Belarus gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, the language was called "Byelorussian" or "Belorussian" (in accordance with the ethnicity and. Retroflexes and voiced affricates are often marked by digraphs A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme (distinct sound) or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. The sound is often, but not necessarily, one which cannot be expressed using a single character in the orthography used by the language. Usually, the term &. Palatal consonants (known in Slavic grammatical tradition as "soft" consonants) are marked either by an acute accent The acute accent is a diacritical mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts or followed by an i. Voicing is phonemic In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.

1. The retroflex consonants are also transcribed with /ʃ/, /ʒ/, etc. However, laminal retroflex is more accurate.^[6]
2. /kʲ/ and /ɡʲ/ are less commonly transcribed as /c/ and /ɟ/. /ɲ/, /t͡ɕ/, /d͡ʑ/, /ɕ/, and /ʑ/ are alveolo-palatal
3. In some Polish dialects, /ɦ/ is distinguished from /x/ (see below).

Within this consonant system one can distinguish three series of fricatives and affricates:

• alveolar, a.k.a. "hissing" (ciąg syczący): z s dz c
• laminal retroflex, a.k.a. "rustling" (ciąg szumiący): ż sz dż cz
• alveolo-palatal, a.k.a. "hushing" (ciąg ciszący): ź ś dź ć

In some Polish dialects, for example Masurian, the consonants of the rustling series are replaced by those of the hissing series.

The phoneme /x/, apart from the voiceless allophone [x] has also a voiced allophone (voiced velar fricative) [ɣ], which appears obligatorily whenever /x/ is followed by a voiced obstruent (also across a word boundary), e.g. dach is [dax] but dach domu is [daɣ dɔmu]. The occurrence of a voiced glottal fricative [ɦ] is found only in the speech of those people from Eastern Borderland and (Upper) Silesia who distinguish between the pronunciation of <h> and <ch>. The same can be said about the velarized alveolar lateral approximant, the so-called "dark l" ([ɫ]), which is a former standard pronunciation of <ł> (now usually [w]).

Soft vs. hard consonants

Multiple palatalizations and some depalatalizations that took place in the history of Proto-Slavic and Polish created quite a complex system of so called "soft" and "hard" consonants. The exact scope of these classes depends on the criteria chosen (in particular, deciding whether some consonants and vowels are allophones of the same or two different phonemes) but some distinction between "hard" and "soft" consonants (and consequently, "hard" and "soft" word stems) can be helpful in describing contemporary word inflection patterns or other morphological processes. According to the simplest criterion, soft consonants are those that can precede the contemporary vowel i /i/, whereas hard ones are those that can precede the contemporary vowel y /ɨ/.

The above table is a simplification since it does not take into account certain few loanwords where /d/, /t/, /z/, /s/, /r/, and /t͡ʂ̠/ appear before i, or where /ɡ/ and /k/ appear before y.

There exist also some phonological descriptions of Polish which distinguish between "hard" labials m /m/, b /b/, p /p/, w /v/, f /f/ and "soft" labials m(i) /mʲ/, b(i) /bʲ/, p(i) /pʲ/, w(i) /vʲ/, f(i) /fʲ/. This softness (palatalization) is hardly heard before /i/ and absent in the syllable coda (unlike in Russian). In this analysis, the pairs [ɨ]-[i], [ɡ]-[ɡʲ] and [k]-[kʲ] can be treated as allophones. The pair [x]-[ç] can almost be unified; [ç] occurs mostly in loanwords. This description leads to the following classification of hard and soft consonants.

Consonant clusters

Polish, like other Slavic languages, permits complex consonant clusters, which historically arose after the disappearance of yers (certain short vowels existing in late Proto-Slavic):

• bezwzględny [bɛzvzɡlɛndnɨ] ('absolute')
• przestępstwo [pʂɛstɛmpstfɔ] ('crime')
• Strwiąż [strfʲɔ̃ʂ] (name of a river)
• wstrząs [fstʂɔ̃s] ('shock')

The existence of complex clusters is, however, not an exclusively Slavic feature; even bigger clusters can be found in Georgian or Salishan languages.

Polish distinguishes between affricates and plosive + fricative consonant clusters, for example:

• czysta [ˈt͡ʂɨsta] ('clean' fem.) vs trzysta [ˈtʂɨsta] ('three hundred')
• dżem' [d͡ʐɛm] ('jam') vs drzem (part of word drzemka meaning 'nap') [ˈdʐɛm], also the imperative of drzemać, ('to have a nap').

In consonant clusters, adjacent obstruents are either all voiced or all voiceless. That is, a consonant cluster cannot contain both voiced and voiceless obstruents. All the obstruents are either voiced (if the last obstruent is normally voiced) or voiceless (if the last obstruent is normally voiceless). This is also true across a word boundary. Word-final obstruents are also pronounced voiceless if the following word starts with a vowel. This rule does not apply to sonorants - a consonant cluster may contain voiced sonorants and voiceless obstruents. Some regional variations of pronunciation, especially in Western and Southern Poland, make voiceless obstruents voiced if the following word starts with a sonorant (for example [ˈbrad ˈojca] instead of the expected [ˈbrat ˈojca])

Examples:

• łódka [ˈwutka] ('boat'), /d/ → [t] (k is normally voiceless)
• kawka [ˈkafka] ('jackdaw'), /v/ → [f] (w is normally voiced)
• także [ˈtaɡʐɛ] ('also'), /k/ → [ɡ] (ż is normally voiced)
• jakby [ˈjaɡbɨ] ('as if'), /k/ → [ɡ] (b is normally voiced)
• król [krul] ('king'), /k/ does not change (r is a sonorant)
• wart [vart] ('worth'), /t/ does not change (r is a sonorant)

The consonants w and rz are normally voiced, but if a consonant cluster ends with w or rz and the preceding consonant is normally voiceless, then the whole consonant cluster is voiceless. W remains voiced after a voiceless consonant in dialects of Wielkopolska and Kresy Wschodnie, but is devoiced in other varieties.

Examples:

• krzak [kʂak] ('bush'), /ʐ/ → [ʂ] (k is normally voiceless)
• odtworzyć [ɔtˈtfɔʐɨt͡ɕ] ('to reproduce'), /d/ → [t] & /v/ → [f] (d and w are normally voiced)

The most popular Polish tongue-twister, a fragment of the poem Chrząszcz by Jan Brzechwa, may serve as yet another example:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

[fʂt͡ʂɛbʐɛʂɨɲɛ xʂɔ̃ʂt͡ʂ bʐmi ftʂt͡ɕiɲɛ]

In [the town of] Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed.

Stress

The predominant stress pattern is penultimate stress with alternating preceding syllables carrying secondary stress (e.g. człowiekowi [ˌt͡ʂwɔvʲɛˈkɔvʲi] 'human being dat. sg.').^[7] Loanwords complicate this, as they introduce antepenultimate stress (e.g. fizyka [ˈfʲizɨka] 'physics'). However, even loanwords may move stress to the penultimate syllable upon suffixation as in uniwersytet [uɲiˈvɛrsɨtɛt] ('university' with antepenultimate stress) which becomes [uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛtu] (with penultimate stress) when the genitive singular affix [u] is added. Over time, loanwords become nativized to have penultimate stress.^[8]

Outside of loanwords, exceptions include:

• verbs in first and second person plural past tense, for example zrobiliśmy ('we did') - the stress is on the third syllable from the end
• verbs in conditional, for example zrobiłbym ('I would do') - stressed on the third syllable from the end
• verbs in first and second person plural conditional, for example zrobilibyśmy ('we would do') - the stress is on the fourth syllable from the end

The explanation for the irregular verbal stress is that these endings are clitics, not verbal inflections: zrobili=śmy, zrobił=bym, zrobili=byśmy. They are remnants of the auxiliary być ('to be'). This can be demonstrated with phrases such as Kogo=ście zobaczyli? (in spoken Polish Kogo zobaczyli=ście?) ('Who did you see?'), where the clitic attaches to the word kogo 'who' rather than to a verb (Kogo zobaczyli=ście?), but kogo maintains its normal stress. However, these endings are in the process of being reanalyzed as suffixes, and as this happens, the stress is shifting to penultimate position in colloquial speech (though by prescriptive grammarians this is still considered an error): zrobiliśmy, zrobiłbym, zrobilibyśmy.^[9]

References

1. ^ Jassem (2003:106)
2. ^ Gussman (2007:2), citing Biedrzycki (1963), Biedrzycki (1978), Wierzchowska (1971:135) in arguing that they are more accurately called diphthongs.
3. ^ ^{a b} Gussman (2007:2-3)
4. ^ Gussman (2007:3), citing Dukievicz (1995:32-33)
5. ^ Jassem (2003:103)
6. ^ Hamann (2004:65)
7. ^ Gussmann (2007:8), deferring to Rubach & Booij (1985) for further discussion.
8. ^ Gussmann (2007:9)
9. ^ Phonetics and Phonology of lexical stress in Polish verbs,Dominika Oliver, Martine Grice, Institute of Phonetics, Saarland University, Germany

Bibliography

• Biedrzycki, L. (1963), "Fonologiczna interpretacja polskich głosek nosowych", Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego, pp. 25-45
• Biedrzycki, L. (1978). Fonologia angielskich i polskich rezonantów. Porównanie samogłosek oraz spółgłosek. Warsaw: PWN.
• Dukievicz, L. (1995), "Fonetyka", in Dukievicz, L., Gramatyka współczesnego języka polskiego. Fonetyka i fonologia, Krakow:: Wydawnictwo Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN, pp. 7-103
• Hamann, Silke (2004), "Retroflex fricatives in Slavic languages", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (1): 53–67, doi:10.1017/S0025100304001604
• Gussman, Edmund (2007). The Phonology of Polish. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926747-7.
• Jassem, Wiktor (2003), "Polish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 33 (1): 103–107, doi:10.1017/S0025100303001191
• Wierzchowska, Bożena (1971), Wymowa polska, Warsaw: PZWS

See also

• Polish alphabet
• Polish orthography
• Polish language
• Polish pronunciation guide

Categories: Language phonologies | Polish language

See Also:

• Polish Phonology

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