Polish

The West Slavonic languages include a subgroup, known as ‘Lechitic’, comprising Polish (its easternmost variety) and the other Slavonic languages once spoken throughout what is now north Germany as far west as the Lüneburg Heath. Most of the dialects of Lechitic were extinct by the late Middle Ages and are attested only by fragmentary evidence, principally in the form of place names; but its westernmost variety, which has been given the name ‘Polabian’ by philologists, survived until the eighteenth century and is recorded in a number of substantial texts. Unless we bestow separate status on Cassubian, a variety of Lechitic still spoken by a population whose size is estimated variously at a few thousand to half a million near the Baltic coast to the west of the Bay of Gdan´sk, Polish is the only Lechitic language which survives to the present day. Cassubian, despite features testifying to its former independence, is now generally regarded as a dialect of Polish. Within West Slavonic the Lechitic subgroup on the one hand and the Czecho-Slovak on the other constitute the two extremities. A link between them is provided by Sorbian. Our earliest evidence of the Polish language comes in the form of place names, tribal

names, and personal names recorded in medieval Latin documents going back to the ninth century AD. Among the most useful records of this kind are the Papal Bull of Gniezno (1136) which contains 410 names and the Bull of Wrocław (Breslau) (1155) containing about 50 more. The same kind of evidence becomes even more plentiful in the thirteenth century, by which time we also find isolated words other than proper nouns imbedded in Latin texts and accompanied by Latin explanations. In about 1270 the Cistercian monks of Henryków, near Wrocław, wrote a history of their monastery (in Latin) and included several Polish words. Their history also contains the first known Polish sentence: ‘daj ac´ ja pobruczę a ty poczywaj’ (‘Let me grind and you rest’), which is quoted to explain the etymology of the place name Brukalice. It is only in the fourteenth century that we find entire Polish texts consisting of many

sentences. The earliest of these are the undated Kazania S´więtokrzyskie (‘Holy Cross Sermons’), which are attributed to the middle of the century or a little later. A translation of the Book of Psalms into Polish, known as the Psałterz Florian´ski (‘St Florian Psalter’),

‘Gniezno Sermons’. There are also court records, dating from 1386 onwards, in which the main account is written in Latin, but the actual words of depositions sworn by witnesses and litigants are in the original Polish. The number of such depositions dating from before 1500 exceeds 8,000 and collectively they constitute one of our main sources for the state of medieval Polish. There are, however, many other sources, mostly of a devotional and literary kind, dating from this period. They include a manuscript of the greater part of the Old Testament, known as Biblia królowej Zofii (‘Queen Sophia’s Bible’), dating from around 1455. The spelling in these early texts is far from systematic and it is consequently, in

particular, almost impossible to distinguish between the three series of sibilants: /ʨ/, /ɕ/, /ʑ/ : /ʧ/, /ʃ/, /Z/ : /ʦ/, /s/, /z/, which in modern Polish are written respectively: c´, s´, z´ : cz, sz, z

. : c, s, z (see Section 2). However, the local features in most of these texts are far

less prominent than one might expect them to have been in the speech of the areas they came from. Clearly, certain standardising processes had been at work. Nevertheless, some local features may be detected in almost any medieval text of reasonable size. To a large extent the medieval dialectal features can be correlated with those observed in modern dialects. For example, the feature chw ? f (e.g. chwała ‘glory’ pronounced as fała) is known to most modern dialects with the exception of that of Great Poland (Wielkopolska). Therefore, medieval spellings with f (such as fala ‘glory’) indicate that the text in question could not have originated in Great Poland. The reconstruction of medieval dialectal divisions is greatly helped by the forensic records owing to the fact that they almost always include the exact date and place of origin. Most of the devotional texts can be assigned either to Little Poland (Małopolska) (e.g. the St Florian Psalter) or to Great Poland (e.g. the Gniezno Sermons). The centre of gravity of the Polish state is known to have been in Great Poland until the reign of Kazimierz the Restorer (reigned 1034-58), but in 1037 the capital was moved to Cracow, and the position of importance consequently acquired by Little Poland was maintained until, and even after, the further transfer of the capital to Warsaw in 1596. The modicum of standardisation exhibited by fourteenth-and fifteenth-century manu-

scripts attracted a lot of interest among Polish scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. It was asserted by one faction that the standard must have been based on the dialect of Great Poland, which even after 1037 retained the seat of the archbishop (at Gniezno) and exerted great authority. Others claimed that the new capital Cracow must have provided the variety on which the standard was based. (No one doubted that Mazovia, which with its capital, Warsaw, was united to Poland only in the sixteenth century, could have had no influence in the matter.) One of the crucial features in this argument was that known as mazurzenie, i.e. the neutralisation of the distinction between c, s, z and cz, sz, z

. respectively. It was held that deliberate avoidance of this

feature in the language of many scribes and later in printed books meant that the standard was based on a variety unaffected by mazurzenie. Dialectologists were able to show that Great Poland did not have mazurzenie, whereas (by the time dialectologists enquired, at least) Little Poland did. The question now turned on dating the arrival of mazurzenie in Little Poland. But the controversy was never settled. The arrival of printing in Poland (the first book in Polish was printed in 1513) put an

end to the untidy spelling system used by the scribes. The printers aimed for less ambiguity and more standardisation. The sixteenth century, known as the Golden Age of Polish literature, was also the age in which the first dictionaries and grammars appeared. The most

important of these are Jan Mączyn´ski’s Lexicon latinopolonicum (Königsberg 1564), which contains 20,700 Polish words, and the Polonicae grammatices institutio (Cracow 1568) of Piotr Statorius (Stojen´ski). Also, at least five different treatises on spelling were published. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the Polish vocalic system underwent a great

change. It had hitherto involved the opposition of long and short vowels, but now vocalic quantity ceased to be a relevant phonemic distinction. The long vowels, in losing their length, acquired a new quality. At the beginning of the fifteenth century only the vowels /i/ and /u/ were unaffected by a quantitative distinction. Short /ɑ/, /e/, /O/ and /A~/ were distinguished from long /ɑ:/, /e:/, /O:/ and /A~:/. But by the sixteenth century there were ten qualitatively distinguished vowel phonemes: /a/, /ɑ/, /O/, /o/, /u/, /i/, /e/, /e/, /e˜/, and /O˜/. Books printed in the sixteenth century and later frequently made use of the acute accent to distinguish between /a/, and /ɑ/, /O/ and /o/, /e/ and /e/. In standard pronunciation, however, the ten-vowel system was eventually reduced to seven vowels, as the distinction between /a/ and /ɑ/, /o/ and /u/, and /e/ and /e/ was neutralised. The last relic of the ten-vowel system is in the modern spelling system, which still uses ó for reasons of tradition (as in wóz ‘cart, car’, gród ‘castle’, etc.), though this letter now represents the same sound as the letter u. With the First Partition of Poland in 1772 the Polish language entered a period of trial

that was to last until the restoration of independence after the First World War. After 1795, when Poland disappeared from the map altogether, there were attempts by all the partitioning powers (Prussia, Austria and Russia) at one time or another to reduce the

language policy in the Austrian partition was modified to the advantage of the Poles and their language was henceforth able to thrive here. In the other two partitions users of Polish suffered numerous indignities. As a result of its prohibition from the schools a clandestine system of Polish instruction grew up to ensure the language’s survival. Matters came to a head in May 1901 in a school in Wrzes´nia (Posnania), where the compulsory use of German during religious instruction led to a riot which attracted the attention of world public opinion. By this time, owing to the practical advantages of knowing German or Russian and

the influence of military service on the male population, a large proportion of educated Poles were bilingual. Bilingualism was most common in the Prussian partition, where educational standards were higher than in Russia or Austria. The existence of three separate administrations fostered the Polish language’s existing tendency to regional variation. Some of the regional features first observed then have survived until recent times even in educated usage: e.g. kurczak ‘chicken’ (Warsaw) corresponding to kurczę elsewhere; na polu ‘outside’ (Cracow) corresponding to na dworze (Poznan´) and na dworze or na dworzu (Warsaw); listonosz ‘postman’ (Cracow) corresponding to listowy (Poznan´) and listonosz or bryftrygier (Warsaw). After the First World War Polish was restored to its position as the language of the

Polish state, but there were also many speakers of other languages living in Poland. At the 1931 census a population of 32,107,000 was recorded, of whom only 21,993,000 gave Polish as their native language. This situation was completely changed in the upheaval brought about by the Second World War. The population according to the first census held within the post-war frontiers (1946) was 23,930,000. Since then it has expanded to over 38 million, of whom almost all have Polish as their native language. The national minorities total about one per cent of the population. At the same time, there are millions of Polish speakers living outside Poland, including over 300,000 in the former USSR and perhaps as many as six million in the USA.