Polszczyzna

Polszczyzna is the Polish language, especially its standard form used in education, media, literature and formal communication. In linguistics, the term denotes the normative variety of Polish, codified in dictionaries, grammars and style guides, and it is distinct from regional dialects (gwary) and from historical or colloquial speech.

Polszczyzna developed from West Slavic speech spoken on Polish lands. It includes Polszczyzna staropolska, the stage roughly from the 12th to the 16th century, which laid the basis for literary Polish. The modern standard Polish emerged in the 18th–19th centuries through prescriptive works and later through official orthography reforms and codification by linguistic institutions, notably the Rada Języka Polskiego and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Today, it is the variety taught in schools and used in public life.

The language is highly inflected, with seven cases, gender and number distinctions, and a flexible word order that often places the verb after the subject. Its orthography uses diacritics such as ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż. The lexicon blends native vocabulary with loanwords from many languages, reflecting centuries of contact. Style ranges from formal literary and journalistic Polish to everyday colloquial speech, and from technical jargon to regional cant.

Polszczyzna coexists with regional dialects and sociolects, and it remains subject to ongoing standardization and guidance to maintain mutual intelligibility and cultural identity in Poland and in Polish-speaking communities abroad.