Polish
Polish is a West Slavic language within the Indo-European language family, primarily spoken by approximately 40 million native speakers worldwide (as of 2024), the majority of whom reside in Poland where it serves as the official language.[1] It belongs to the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, closely related to Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and the extinct Polabian, and features a highly inflected grammar with seven noun cases, three genders, and flexible word order that allows for stylistic variation while maintaining subject-verb-object as the neutral structure.[2] The language employs a Latin-based alphabet of 32 letters, including nine with diacritical marks (such as ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, and ż), and is noted for its phonetic complexity, including eight vowel phonemes (six oral and two nasalized), 35 consonants, and frequent consonant clusters, up to five consonants in final position.[2] Historically, Polish emerged from Proto-Slavic around the 10th century, with the earliest written records appearing in Latin documents from the 12th century and the first full texts by the 14th century; it underwent standardization in the 16th century following the introduction of printing, and evolved through periods of Old Polish (up to the 16th century), Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries), and Modern Polish (from the 18th century onward), enduring suppression during Poland's partitions from 1772 to 1918 but experiencing revivals tied to national identity.[2] Today, Polish is spoken not only in Poland but also by significant diaspora communities, including about 0.5 million in the United States, around 150,000 ethnic Poles in Ukraine (many bilingual), and smaller populations in Germany, Canada, and Lithuania, contributing to its status as one of the largest Slavic languages and the tenth-largest edition on Wikipedia (as of 2025).[2][3] The language's vocabulary, estimated at around 200,000 words, draws heavily from Latin, German, Yiddish, and French influences due to historical interactions, while its dialects—primarily Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Mazovian, and Silesian—exhibit regional variations in pronunciation and lexicon, with Kashubian sometimes classified as a separate language rather than a dialect.[2] Polish grammar lacks definite and indefinite articles, relies on three tenses (past, present, future), and features aspectual distinctions in verbs to indicate completion or ongoing action, making it a fusional language with rich morphological complexity that poses challenges for non-native learners.[4] Culturally, Polish has played a pivotal role in literature, producing Nobel laureates like Henryk Sienkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, and Wisława Szymborska, and remains a vital medium for Poland's scientific, artistic, and diplomatic contributions on the global stage.[5]History
Origins and early development
The Polish language traces its roots to Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages, which was spoken approximately from the 5th to the 9th century AD across Eastern Europe. As part of the West Slavic branch, early Polish dialects began to diverge from Proto-Slavic during this period, influenced by the migrations and settlements of Slavic tribes in the region that would become Poland. A distinctive feature of West Slavic vocalism, including proto-Polish, was the development and retention of nasal vowels, derived from Proto-Slavic sequences of vowels followed by nasals (*en, *em > *ę; *on, *om > *ǫ), which contrasted with denasalization in East and South Slavic branches; Polish uniquely preserved this nasality into its modern form, though with later mergers and shifts.[6][7] By the 10th century, Polish had emerged as a distinct West Slavic language within the Lechitic subgroup, coinciding with the formation of the early Polish state under the Piast dynasty. Major phonological innovations during this early phase included the loss of yers—the reduced vowels *ь and *ъ—which vocalized into full vowels (typically *e or *o) around the 10th–11th centuries, leading to alternations like Polish rzeka ('river') from Proto-Slavic rěka. Palatalization processes, inherited from Proto-Slavic's three progressive palatalizations (affecting velars before front vowels) and further developed in West Slavic, were augmented by a fourth palatalization in early Polish (ca. 12th–13th centuries), where velars softened before front consonants to produce affricates and fricatives such as /tɕ/ (from kt, gt) and /ɕ/ (from sk). These changes, along with ablaut shifts like e > o and ě > a before dentals, solidified Polish's consonant inventory and vowel harmony distinct from neighboring Slavic varieties.[8][9] The first written attestations of Polish appear in the context of Latin chronicles and documents during the Piast era (10th–14th centuries), reflecting the dynasty's consolidation of power and adoption of Christianity in 966 AD. Over 400 Polish personal and place names are recorded in Pope Innocent III's 1136 bull, marking the earliest glosses. The first complete sentence in Polish, "Daj, ać ja pobruczę, a ty poczywaj" ('Let me rumble, and you rest'), occurs in the Book of Henryków, a Latin chronicle dated to around 1270. Continuous prose emerges in the Holy Cross Sermons (Kazania świętokrzyskie), a 14th-century manuscript containing religious texts in Old Polish, representing the oldest extant vernacular literary work. During this period, Latin exerted significant lexical influence through ecclesiastical and administrative use, introducing terms like msza ('mass'), while German borrowings increased from the 13th century onward due to Ostsiedlung migrations and trade, contributing words related to law, crafts, and feudalism such as prawo (influenced via German Recht).[9][8][10]Middle and modern standardization
The standardization of the Polish language gained momentum in the 16th century during the Renaissance, as the introduction of the printing press facilitated the dissemination of vernacular texts and helped establish consistent orthographic and literary norms. Jan Kochanowski, a prominent Renaissance poet, played a pivotal role by modeling his works on classical Latin and Greek traditions, thereby elevating Polish as a literary medium capable of expressing complex humanistic ideas and establishing poetic patterns that influenced subsequent generations.[11] His efforts contributed to the refinement of Polish syntax and vocabulary, making the language more suitable for high literature and administrative use in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.[12] A landmark in this process was the publication of the Cracow Bible (Biblia Leopolity) in 1561, the first complete printed Catholic translation of the Bible into Polish from the Latin Vulgate, undertaken by Jan Nicz (Leopolita) in Kraków. This edition, printed by the Szarffenberg house, not only made scripture accessible to Polish speakers but also promoted orthographic uniformity by employing diacritics and digraphs to represent the language's 44 phonemes, influencing subsequent religious and secular printing.[13] The Swedish Deluge (1655–1660), a devastating invasion that ravaged Polish territories, disrupted this progress by destroying libraries, manuscripts, and printing infrastructure, leading to a temporary decline in literary production and standardization efforts amid widespread cultural devastation. In the 19th century, amid the partitions of Poland (1795–1918), which divided the country among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Polish intellectuals pursued reforms to preserve national identity through language codification despite suppression. Samuel Bogumił Linde's Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language), published in six volumes between 1807 and 1814 in Warsaw, marked a foundational achievement with approximately 60,000 entries, providing a comprehensive monolingual reference that standardized vocabulary, grammar, and orthography across partitioned regions.[14] This work, later revised in 1854–1860, served as a bulwark against Germanization and Russification policies, fostering linguistic unity. Efforts culminated in the 1830 publication Rozprawy i wnioski o ortografii polskiej by a deputacy appointed by the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning, which debated and proposed rules for spelling consistency to counteract dialectal variations exacerbated by territorial divisions. The 20th century brought further challenges and consolidations, shaped by world wars and political shifts. In the interwar Second Polish Republic (1918–1939), the 1936 orthographic reform, initiated by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, modernized spelling by simplifying digraphs (e.g., replacing ch with h in some contexts) and aligning orthography more closely with phonology, addressing inconsistencies from earlier periods.[15] Post-World War II, under Soviet-influenced communist rule (1945–1989), Polish underwent unification efforts amid ideological pressures; Russian loanwords proliferated in political, technical, and ideological domains, such as sowiety (soviets) and terms for collectivization like kołchoz, reflecting Moscow's dominance while native purists resisted excessive Russification.[16] Contemporary standardization is overseen by the Rada Języka Polskiego (Polish Language Council), established in 1996 by the Presidium of the Polish Academy of Sciences as an advisory body to promote linguistic norms and address modern challenges like globalization.[17] The Council has guided post-communist reforms, including updates to spelling guidelines developed over 2022–2024 and approved in May 2024, refining rules for compound words, foreign integrations, capitalization of adjectives derived from proper names (e.g., lowercase chopinowski), and demonyms (e.g., capitalized Warszawiak), with implementation effective January 1, 2026, to enhance Polish adaptability in digital and international contexts while preserving its core structure.[18]Classification
Indo-European family
Polish is classified as a West Slavic language within the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family, a grouping supported by shared phonological innovations from Proto-Indo-European, including satemization and the ruki sound law.[19] The Balto-Slavic proto-language is estimated to have existed around 4,500–7,000 years before present, splitting into Baltic and Slavic subgroups approximately 3,500–2,500 years before present, with Slavic further diversifying into West, East, and South branches approximately 1,700–1,300 years ago.[20] This positions Polish among the westernmost Slavic languages, spoken primarily in Central Europe. A hallmark of Indo-European heritage in Polish is the retention of common lexical roots, such as the word for "mother": matka, which traces back through Proto-Slavic *matь to the Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr, reflecting systematic sound changes like the merger of laryngeals and vowel shifts across the family.[8] Similar cognates appear in other Indo-European languages, underscoring Polish's deep ties to the family's reconstructed vocabulary. In terms of divergences, West Slavic languages like Polish differ from East and South Slavic branches in phonological developments, notably the preservation of certain consonant clusters (e.g., tl and dl) that were simplified elsewhere and the early integration of the phoneme /f/, absent in Proto-Slavic but adopted from Latin and Germanic loans during the migration period, becoming a core part of the inventory. These features highlight West Slavic's distinct evolutionary path within the Slavic subgroup. The genealogical structure of West Slavic places Polish in the Lechitic group, most closely related to extinct Polabian and Pomeranian dialects like Kashubian, while sharing broader affinities with the Czechoslovak clade (Czech and Slovak) and the Sorbian languages (Upper and Lower Sorbian), forming a compact western branch that diverged from Proto-Slavic around the 6th–7th centuries.[8]Slavic subgroup
Polish is classified as a West Slavic language within the broader Slavic branch of the Indo-European family, emerging from the diversification of Proto-Slavic dialects around the 6th century AD. The Slavic languages began to split into East, West, and South branches during this period, with West Slavic forming through shared phonological innovations such as the metathesis of liquids (e.g., Proto-Slavic *golva > Polish głowa 'head') and the development of palatalized consonants distinct from those in East and South Slavic. Within West Slavic, Polish belongs to the Lechitic subgroup, which also encompassed the now-extinct Pomeranian (including dialects like Kashubian, though often considered a separate language) and Polabian languages; these diverged further in the early medieval period, with Polabian disappearing by the 18th century due to assimilation.[21] A key shared feature among all Slavic languages, including Polish, is the distinction between imperfective and perfective verb aspects, which conveys whether an action is ongoing or completed. For instance, the imperfective verb czytać means 'to read' (habitually or in progress), while its perfective counterpart przeczytać means 'to read through' or 'to finish reading,' a system inherited from Proto-Slavic and used to express temporal and aktionsart nuances without separate auxiliary verbs. This aspectual pairing is a hallmark of Slavic verbal morphology, facilitating concise expression of viewpoint in narrative and description.[2] Polish exhibits moderate to high mutual intelligibility with fellow West Slavic languages like Czech and Slovak, with empirical studies showing approximately 60% comprehension in written word translation tasks and similar levels in spoken contexts for Polish-Czech and Polish-Slovak pairs.[22] In contrast, intelligibility drops significantly with East Slavic languages such as Russian, where shared vocabulary is offset by divergent phonology and grammar, resulting in limited comprehension based on linguistic distance metrics. West Slavic innovations further distinguish Polish from East Slavic, including the preservation of guttural fricatives like /x/ (as in chleb 'bread') and voiced /ɡ/ (as in góra 'mountain'), alongside a fixed penultimate stress pattern that contrasts with the mobile stress typical of Russian and Ukrainian. These features underscore Polish's position as a distinct yet closely related member of the Slavic family.[22]Geographic distribution
Number of speakers
Polish has approximately 40 million native speakers worldwide, with the overwhelming majority residing in Poland, where it is the primary language for about 98% of the population according to the 2021 national census.[23] This equates to roughly 35.8 million native speakers within Poland's usually resident population of around 36.5 million as of 2025. The language's strong position in the country reflects its role as the de facto and official tongue, spoken daily in homes and communities across all regions. Additionally, the 2022-2025 influx of over 1 million Ukrainian refugees has increased L2 Polish speakers in Poland.[24] Beyond Poland, the Polish diaspora contributes significantly to the global speaker base, with an estimated 10-15 million individuals maintaining some level of proficiency, though fluency rates decline across generations. In the United States, approximately 9 million people claim Polish ancestry, forming one of the largest ethnic groups and sustaining vibrant cultural and linguistic communities, particularly in cities like Chicago.[25] In the United Kingdom, the post-2004 EU accession wave led to over 800,000 Polish-born residents by recent estimates, many of whom use Polish actively in daily life and family settings. Other notable diaspora pockets exist in Germany, Canada, and Brazil, where historical migrations have preserved the language among millions of descendants. As a second language, Polish is spoken by an estimated 2-3 million people, primarily in neighboring countries with historical Polish minorities, such as Ukraine and Belarus, where it serves as a heritage or regional tongue. Overall, total speakers, including L1 and L2 users, reach about 45 million globally as of 2025.[26] Demographic trends show a slight decline in native speakers within Poland due to sustained emigration since the 2004 EU accession, resulting in a net population loss of around 2 million, many of whom continue using Polish abroad.[27] However, digital platforms have fostered growth in virtual communities, with Polish-language online engagement involving tens of millions of users through social media, forums, and content creation. Age-wise, about 80% of Polish speakers are under 50 years old, reflecting the nation's median age of 42.5, while youth bilingualism in English has risen to around 70% proficiency among those under 30, driven by education and media exposure.[28][29]Official status and dialects
Polish is the official language of the Republic of Poland, as stipulated in Article 27 of the Constitution adopted on April 2, 1997, which states that "the Polish language shall be the official language in the Republic of Poland" while respecting national minority rights under international agreements.[30] Since Poland's accession to the European Union on May 1, 2004, Polish has also served as one of the 24 official languages of the EU, facilitating its use in EU institutions and legislation.[31] Additionally, Polish holds co-official status in specific regions, such as the Punsk commune in Podlaskie Voivodeship, where it is bilingual alongside Lithuanian under local administrative provisions to accommodate the Lithuanian minority.[32] The Polish language forms a dialect continuum primarily divided into four major groups: Greater Polish (spoken in western Poland, including Poznań), Lesser Polish (prevalent in southern and southeastern regions like Kraków), Masovian (northeastern areas around Warsaw), and Silesian (southwestern Upper Silesia).[33] Kashubian, often considered a distinct but closely related Lechitic language rather than a strict dialect, is spoken mainly in Pomerania by approximately 88,000 people according to the 2021 census and was officially recognized as Poland's sole regional language in 2005 through an amendment to the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities and Regional Languages.[34] Silesian, with around 460,000 declaring use at home according to the 2021 census, faced ongoing debates over its status; although the Sejm passed a bill in April 2024 to recognize it as a regional language, President Andrzej Duda vetoed it in May 2024, arguing it is a dialect of Polish rather than a separate language. The veto has not been overridden as of 2025, though the government has indicated plans to pursue recognition again.[35][36] Border dialects reflect cross-cultural influences, such as the Goral variety of Lesser Polish spoken by the Goral highlanders in the Tatra Mountains along the Poland-Slovakia border, where it blends Polish and Slovak features and is used by communities in regions like Podhale and Orava.[37] Similarly, eastern Masovian dialects extend influences into northwestern Belarus, particularly among Polish minorities in areas like Grodno, where they incorporate local Belarusian elements while maintaining core Polish phonology and grammar.[38] Standardization efforts, centered on a supra-regional variety derived from central Polish urban speech, have promoted a unified "koine" in education, media, and public life since the 19th century, leading to the dominance of this form in national broadcasting and print media.[39] This process has contributed to the endangerment of minority dialects, with some, like Polabian—a Lechitic relative of Polish—becoming extinct by the early 19th century, as its last fluent speaker died around 1825 in the German-Polish borderlands.[40]Phonology
Vowels and diphthongs
The standard variety of Polish features a vowel system with six oral monophthongs: the high front /i/, high central /ɨ/, mid front /e/, low central /a/, mid back /o/, and high back /u/. These vowels lack phonemic length distinctions, with duration varying primarily due to prosodic factors rather than contrastive meaning.[41] In addition to the oral vowels, Polish has two nasal vowels: the mid front /ɛ̃/ (ę) and the mid back /ɔ̃/ (ą). The /ɔ̃/ exhibits allophonic variation, realized as [ɔ̃] before non-labial consonants and [ã] before labial consonants or in isolation. These nasals are phonemically distinct but exhibit complex realizations, often surfacing as an oral vowel followed by a homorganic nasal consonant in consonant clusters, particularly before stops and affricates (e.g., /ɛ̃/ as [ɛn] in "ręka" [rɛŋka] 'hand'). This denasalization pattern reflects historical developments and is obligatory in such environments to avoid impermissible sequences.[42][43] Diphthongs are not phonemic in native Polish vocabulary but appear sporadically in loanwords, including rising types like /aj/ (as in "haj" [xaj] 'hey'), /ej/ (as in "hej" [hɛj] 'hey'), and /aw/ (as in "gau" [ɡaw] 'gauze'). Some dialects exhibit akanie, a reduction process where unstressed /o/ and /e/ shift toward , contributing to regional variation in vowel quality. Allophonic variation affects the mid front vowel /e/, which is typically realized as open-mid [ɛ] but raises to close-mid before hard (non-palatalized) consonants, influencing the tongue height in preconsonantal positions.[44]Consonants and clusters
The Polish consonant inventory comprises 35 phonemes, characterized by a rich array of fricatives and affricates, particularly in the sibilant series, which distinguish it from many other Indo-European languages. These include six stops: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /ɡ/. There are six affricates: /t͡s/, /d͡z/, /t͡ʂ/, /d͡ʐ/, /t͡ɕ/, /d͡ʑ/. The fricatives number nine: /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /ʂ/, /ʐ/, /x/, /ɕ/, /ʑ/. This series features three coronal places of articulation—alveolar (/s z/), postalveolar or retroflex (/ʂ ʐ/), and alveolopalatal (/ɕ ʑ/). Additional consonants encompass nasals (/m/, /n/, /ɲ/), approximants (/j/, /w/, /r/), and laterals (/l/), completing the system with approximants and resonants that contribute to the language's sonority profile.[45]| Manner/Place | Bilabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Alveolopalatal | Palatal | Velar | Glottal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | p, b | t, d | k, ɡ | |||||
| Affricates | t͡s, d͡z | t͡ʂ, d͡ʐ | t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ | |||||
| Fricatives | f, v | s, z | ʂ, ʐ | ɕ, ʑ | x | |||
| Nasals | m | n | ɲ | |||||
| Laterals | l, ɫ | |||||||
| Trills | r | |||||||
| Approximants | j | w |
Orthography
Alphabet and letters
The Polish alphabet is a variant of the Latin script consisting of 32 letters, which include both standard Latin characters and nine modified with diacritical marks to represent specific sounds unique to the language.[47][48] The letters are: A, Ą, B, C, Ć, D, E, Ę, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ł, M, N, Ń, O, Ó, P, R, S, Ś, T, U, W, Y, Z, Ź, Ż.[47] These diacritics include the acute accent (ć, ś, ń, ó, ź), the dot above (ż), the stroke (ł), and the ogonek (ą, ę), which distinguish Polish from other Latin-based alphabets.[48] In addition to single letters, Polish orthography employs several digraphs—combinations of two letters representing single phonemes—and one trigraph, which emerged as adaptations to convey fricative and affricate sounds not present in basic Latin. Common digraphs include ch (as in "loch"), cz (like "ch" in "church"), rz (similar to French "j" in "je"), and sz (like "sh" in "ship"); the trigraph dzi represents a sound akin to "j" in "jam" but palatalized.[47] These digraphs originated in the medieval period as Polish scribes adapted Latin letters to approximate Slavic phonology, influenced by earlier exposure to Cyrillic script through Orthodox Christian contacts before Poland's full adoption of Western Christianity.[49] The Latin alphabet's adoption in Poland began in the 12th century following the country's Christianization in 966, marking a shift from oral traditions and limited use of Cyrillic or Glagolitic scripts for Slavic languages.[50] By the 14th century, it had become fully Latinized for Polish writing, with the earliest substantial texts appearing in this script, enabling the documentation of the language's phonology through evolving conventions.[49] The ogonek diacritic, used for nasal vowels in ą and ę, was introduced around the 1440s in early orthographic treatises to denote these sounds more precisely, replacing earlier superscript notations.[51] Polish punctuation follows standard Latin conventions, including periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points, but features a distinctive rule for lists: commas separate all items except the final pair, which is joined by "i" (and) without a preceding comma, avoiding the Oxford comma style common in English.[52] For example, a list reads "jabłka, banany i pomarańcze" (apples, bananas and oranges).[53]Spelling conventions
Polish orthography adheres closely to the phonemic principle, whereby each phoneme is typically represented by a single letter or digraph, ensuring a high degree of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. This system, standardized in the 16th century through printed texts, uses 32 letters and specific digraphs to encode the language's 35 consonant phonemes, minimizing ambiguities in reading and writing.[54][55] Digraphs play a key role in this representation, combining two letters to denote single sounds not covered by the basic alphabet. For instance, sz corresponds to the voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ (as in szkoła "school"), cz to the voiceless retroflex affricate /tʂ/ (as in czas "time"), and rz to the voiced retroflex fricative /ʐ/ (as in rzeka "river"). The choice between rz and the single letter ż (also /ʐ/) follows etymological and morphological rules; rz is preferred after consonants like b, d, p, or t (e.g., brzmieć "to sound," drzazga "splinter"), though in rare exceptions such as marznąć "to freeze," rz is pronounced as separate /r z/. In specific morphological contexts, such as after prefixes ending in d, b, p, or t, rz may surface as /z/ due to historical assimilation (e.g., przebrać "to dress," pronounced with /z/ in the cluster).[56][47] Exceptions to the phonemic consistency arise primarily in loanwords and historical remnants. Orthographic doubles, uncommon in native vocabulary, appear in borrowings to indicate gemination (lengthened pronunciation), such as ss for prolonged /s/ in words like lasso or miss, distinguishing them from single-letter forms that might alter meaning (e.g., ssanie "sucking" vs. sanie "sleigh"). Foreign loanwords often adapt to Polish conventions, replacing non-native sequences like qu with kw (e.g., kworum "quorum," kwarc "quartz") to align with native phonotactics, while retaining original spelling in unassimilated cases like proper names.[57][51] Nasal vowels are spelled with diacritics: ą represents /ɔ̃/ (nasalized /o/, akin to French bon) and ę /ɛ̃/ (nasalized /e/, akin to French vin), but they denasalize before fricatives and stops, becoming an oral vowel followed by a homorganic nasal consonant (e.g., mąka /ˈmɔŋka/ "flour," wzięty /ˈvʑɛmtɨ/ "taken"). This rule applies consistently, except word-finally where ę often reduces to /ɛ/ in casual speech.[58][59] Recent updates to orthographic rules, announced by the Polish Language Council (Rada Języka Polskiego) under the Polish Academy of Sciences in May 2024 (following discussions in 2022–2024), address hyphenation and other conventions for clarity in modern usage. Effective from January 1, 2026, these include optional combined or separated writing for prefixes like super- or ekstra- (e.g., superpomysł or super pomysł), separated writing for conditional particles like -bym with conjunctions (e.g., czy by nie pojechać). In October 2025, the Council withdrew a proposed change allowing variant spelling for multi-word geographical names ending in nominative nouns, maintaining prior conventions for those. Abbreviations such as t.j. for "to jest" (equivalent to "i.e.") follow existing standards.[18][60][61]Grammar
Nouns, cases, and gender
Polish nouns are inflected for seven grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative.[62][63] These cases mark the noun's syntactic role within a phrase, with endings varying by gender, number, and animacy.[64] Polish nouns belong to three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine nouns are further subdivided into personal (virile, typically referring to male humans), animate (non-human living beings), and inanimate categories, which influence declension patterns, particularly in the accusative and plural forms.[62][63] For example, pies (dog) is masculine animate, while dom (house) is masculine inanimate, and okno (window) is neuter. Feminine nouns often end in -a or consonants in the nominative singular, and neuter nouns typically end in -o, -e, or -ę.[64] Declension classes are primarily determined by the noun's gender and stem type (hard or soft, based on the final consonant). Hard stems end in non-palatalized consonants, while soft stems involve palatalization or end in soft consonants like ś or ć. Masculine nouns like dom follow a hard stem pattern with genitive singular -u, whereas soft stem masculines may alternate vowels or use -i. Feminine and neuter nouns show similar distinctions, with soft stems often featuring endings like -i instead of -y in plurals.[62][63] Nouns inflect for singular and plural number, with masculine plurals distinguishing virile from non-virile forms. Virile plurals (for personal masculines) typically use nominative endings like -i or -owie (e.g., mężczyźni for men), while non-virile masculines, along with feminines and neuters, use -y/-i/-e/-a. In the accusative, animate masculines (both virile and non-virile) take the genitive form in the singular, but virile plurals may align with genitive, whereas non-virile animate plurals follow the nominative.[64][63] The following table illustrates representative declension patterns for singular and plural forms, using dom (masculine inanimate, hard stem), pies (masculine animate, soft stem), and okno (neuter, hard stem). Endings are simplified; actual forms may involve stem changes like consonant alternations (e.g., p to ps in pies).| Case | dom (m. sg./pl.) | pies (m. sg./pl.) | okno (n. sg./pl.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | dom / domy | pies / psy | okno / okna |
| Genitive | domu / domów | psa / psów | okna / okien |
| Dative | domowi / domom | psu / psom | oknu / oknom |
| Accusative | dom / domy | psa / psy | okno / okna |
| Instrumental | domem / domami | psem / psami | oknem / oknami |
| Locative | domu / domach | psie / psach | oknie / oknach |
| Vocative | dom / domy | pies / psy | okno / okna |