I was writing a semi-official letter the other day, and even before I managed to get to “Szanowna Pani“, I was already stumped. Not that it’s anything usual, me getting stumped, but it’s been happening with amazing regularity lately.
Anyway, my MS Word automatically fills in the current date according to the American system: the month comes first, then the day, then a comma, and then the year. And suddenly, I was sitting there in front of my laptop deep in thought, not entirely sure how to properly write it in Polish. The key word here, of course, is “properly.”
Dates in Poland are written in several different ways.
- rok (year), miesiąc (month), dzień (day),
- dzień (day), miesiąc (month), rok (year),
- as numerals: 3.10.2009, or 3.10.09,
- or like this: 3 X 2009
- sometimes there’s a lone “r” following the year: 2009 r.
- with the month spelled out, and so on…
- and if we’re going to spell the month, does it decline, or not?
You see where I’m going with this, right? Such a simple, everyday thing as the current date left me scrambling for some heavy-duty Polish language help.
And what did I learn? That when it comes to the correct date format(s) in Polish, pretty much anything goes, except (hey, of course there would be an “except” – after all this is Polish we’re talking about here, and everybody knows we live for “excepts”):
- the date format should be appropriate to the text (official, private, etc),
- if you choose to write the month as a Roman numeral, it’s a mistake to write the date like this “3.X.2009 r.” There should be no dots before and after the Roman numeral,
- and, yes the month does decline. So, we need to write “3 października 2009 r.”, and not “3 październik 2009 r.”
- and finally, the date should follow this order: day-month-year, or year-month-date (for official correspondence), and unfortunately, it means that you can’t begin with the month, as my MS Word insists on doing.
The “r.” is short for “rok” (year) and if you feel like it, you can spell out the whole word. But of course, it declines as well. So it’s “3 października 2009 roku” and not “3 październik 2009 rok”. But if you don’t like that “r”, you can skip it altogether and write “3 października 2009” or “3.10.09” or “3.10.2009”.
So, how did I finally write it in my letter?
2009.10.03 for easy filing of official correspondence that nobody bothers to read anyway.
PS. For my native Polish readers who, I’m sure, will feel the need to tell me that my info is incorrect, or not entirely correct - this post was written based on advice taken from PWN’s “Poradnik językowy” and my conversation with a polonistyka professor at a very prestigious Polish university.
). And young people often use it's shortened form "nara" (just like you said) 