Posted by Anna Ikeda
I would like to welcome all my new readers and thank you guys for commenting. It’s great to see your feedback! I also want to encourage you to ask me questions and offer suggestion regarding what you want me to write about here. Don’t be shy! Whether it’s grammar, spelling, history, or “my grandma used to make this yummy Polish dish”, I will do my best to answer all your queries.
Ed already started by asking about Galicia in his comment. So today, it’s all Galicia all the time. Ed, enjoy! And let me know if this is the information you were looking for.
The problem with Galicia is that there are actually two of them, one in Poland and one in Spain. And if you’re not quite sure which Galicia region you have in mind, it can be quite confusing –it was even to me when I was in school. Here, of course we’ll talk about Galicia in central Europe.
The name “Galicia” (Galicja in Polish) is a historical term, and as such – is no longer used to describe the area. And the region itself is now divided between Poland and Ukraine. So just where exactly this Galicia used to be? Get a map of Ukraine and look for Lviv (Lwów in Polish), then go a little bit east until you reach Ternopil (Tarnopol in Polish). From there trace a bit south-west to Ivano-Frankovsk. That little triangle is the original Galicia.
“But wait!” you could say, “It’s all Ukraine.”
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
Poland has had a complicated history. And that’s a boring historical fact. What’s not boring is how that history affected the names of all sorts of places. In certain regions of what is now Poland, people sometimes lived in three different countries, all within the span of a lifetime, and without ever leaving their home town. Each time when a place got new sovereign overlords, the first thing the new honchos did, was to impose a new national language. That in turn resulted in a change of the local name.
Anybody, who’s ever tried to research their Polish genealogy, knows how annoying this whole name changing business can be.
For example:
Hirschberg – Jelenia Góra
Allenstein – Olsztyn
Breslau – Wrocław
And the most infamous of them all: Auschwitz – Oświęcim.
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
Compared to other European languages, Polish is a rather homogenous language. For that, oddly enough, you can thank the Soviet Union. When the USSR annexed large chunks of formerly Polish territories during World War II, millions of Poles from those areas trekked west. They brought with them their own dialects and speech patterns, which after some time, either vanished, or assimilated into mainstream Polish.
These days, to a non-native speaker, big-city Polish sounds more or less uniform, regardless of where in Poland it’s spoken. To look for dialects, you need to venture off the English-speaking expat grid and head for the countryside.
Three examples that immediately come to mind that can be recognized even by foreign ears, are the funky Polish variants spoken in the West, South and North, respectively.
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). And young people often use it's shortened form "nara" (just like you said) 