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Polish Language Course

Introduction

IMPORTANT: Polish contains some special characters. You should set your browser to read 'ISO-8859-2' documents. A Windows-1250 version is also available.

1. Geographic information about Poland.

Poland lies in central Europe between Germany (to the west), Czech Republic and Slovak Republic (south), Ukraine and Belorus (east), Lithuania, Russia and the Baltic Sea (north). In the area of Poland (312,700 sq km) live about 39 million people.

Look at the table below to find out more about Poland.

CapitalWarszawa (Warsaw) about 1,600,000 inhabitants
Other cities
  • £ód¼ (850,000)
  • Kraków (Cracow) (750,000)
  • Wroc³aw (650,000)
  • Poznań (600,000)
Rivers
  • Wis³a (Vistula) 1,047 km
  • Odra (Oder) 854 km, 742 km in Poland

Mountains
  • Karpaty (Carpathians, including Tatra)
  • Sudety (Sudetes)

The word 'Poland' comes from the name of one of the tribes living in the 10th century in the area of west Poland. The tribe had conquered most of the area of present Poland and the date of its Christianization (966 AD) is recognized as a beginning of the Polish country.

2. Informaton about the language

The Polish language is mostly spoken in Poland (98.6% of inhabitants of Poland uses Polish as their first language). A large number of Polish-speaking people live in Lithuania (7.7% of population), Ukraine, Belorus and US (imigrants).

Polish is an Indo-European, Slavonic language, belonging to the West Slavonic subgroup (see table below).

Slavonic languages

West Slavonic
  • Polish
  • Czech
  • Slovak
  • Low Lusatian
  • High Lusatian
  • Polabian (dead)

East Slavonic
  • Russian
  • Ukrainian
  • Belorussian

South Slavonic
  • Bulgarian
  • Serbo-Croatian
  • Macedonian
  • Slovenian
  • Old Church Slavonic (dead)


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NOTE: If you have found a mistake or anything that does not work properly please send me an e-mail.

Piotr Pikuta
[email protected]

Last updated: May 13th, 2001