Polish

Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic subgroup within the Indo-European family, and it is the official language of Poland. About 39.7 million people spoke it as a first language in 2024, which makes it the sixth most spoken language of the European Union. Its sources trace it to the tenth century, when the rise of the Polish state drew a collection of related dialects together, and they connect the writing of Polish to religion: after Mieszko I accepted baptism in 966, Western Christianity brought the Latin alphabet to Poland, which made it possible to write down a language that had until then existed only in speech. The modern alphabet adds nine letters with diacritics to the Latin base. Polish absorbed a large share of its learned vocabulary from Latin, and Latin remained the official language of the Polish state for a very long time. Historically Polish was also a lingua franca in Central Europe, and large Polish-speaking communities live abroad, from the United Kingdom to the United States and Brazil.