Posts tagged w/ variation

Is It Still Polish?

Posted by Anna Ikeda

powiat_pucczi_polish_road_signCompared 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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