An Introduction to the Polish Language
Polish is a Western Slavic language spoken by over 45 million people worldwide and is an official/recognized minority religion in Poland, Belarus, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Since Polish belongs to the Western Slavic branch, it is a latin-based alphabet with some diacritics.
There are 32 letters in the Polish alphabet: 9 vowels and 23 consonants. The vowels in alphabetical order are as follows: a, ą, e, ę, i, o, ó, u, and y. Two vowels (ó/u) share one sound, meaning there are only eight vowel sounds.
In Polish, six of the vowel sounds are oral vowels and are monophthongs and two are nasal (demonstrated by the [~] above the IPA symbol). The nasal vowel pronunciation will vary depending on the proceeding consonants. This will be discussed later on in a separate post.
The phonemes of Polish consonants can be found in a variety of Indo-European languages (e.g. English, Italian, and Russian), and since it is a Latin-derived alphabet there is less of a barrier for English speakers than with Cyrillic-based Slavic languages. As a general rule, dental consonants are pronounced more like Italian dental consonants unless they are palatalized (i.e. softened). The consonants that are most familiar to English speakers are: B, D, F, G, K, M, N, P, S, T, Z. The consonant L is similar to the Italian pronunciation than the velarized pronunciation in American English. The consonant c is pronounced as [ʦ].
Like in Russian, consonants have soft and hard counterparts. Consonants can be softened with acute diacritics as in ń [ɲ]. These consonants can also be rewritten with an i in place of the diacritic when followed by another vowel. Unlike Russian, Polish has another layer to the softening of consonants. In addition to hard or soft, some consonants can be functionally soft. As a consonant's pronunciation mutates, the pronunciation will switch from dental, to retroflex, and to palatal. Most of the time, this is demonstrated through the use of digraphs, however this is not always the case. For example, the letter z changes from its dental pronunciation [z] to the alveolar [ʐ], ż, to the softened ź/zi or [ʑ]. These functionally soft consonants now belong to the group of hard consonants.
The last three letters that are different from English pronunciation are W, Ł, and H. The first of the three is pronounced like in German, or [v], while the second is the labio-velar approximant [w] like in 'water'. H, [x], is pronounced like the words loch, or хороший.
Only in foreign words would you encounter the letters Q, V, and X. When pronouncing such words, they will follow the pronunciation of the language it is borrowed from or be pronounced in either a Polish way or as in the language from which it was borrowed. For example, “quiz” is pronounced [kvis], and Québec [kɛbɛk]. Video [vidɛɔ] and X will be pronounced as [ks] and usually is found in such a form already in words such as ksylofon [ksɪlɔfɔn] "xylophone". I could not find a word beginning with 'x,' but let me know if you find one!
In upcoming posts I will discuss in further detail nasal vowels, functionally soft consonants and palatalization, and also palatalization in comparison to Russian.