polszczyzn

Polszczyzna is the Polish language, a West Slavic language of the Lechitic subgroup spoken by the majority of residents of Poland and by Polish communities worldwide. It functions as the official language of Poland and is used in education, administration, media, and public life. The standard form, polszczyzna standardowa, is codified through orthography and grammar codices and is taught in schools; it coexists with regional dialects and sociolects. Polish uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics; the official orthography marks nasal vowels with ą and ę and there is also ó representing a back rounded vowel /u/. There are 32 letters in the alphabet. The language is highly inflectional, with seven grammatical cases, three genders, two numbers, and rich verb aspect, tense, and negation systems.

Polszczyzna develops within a context of regional varieties, including Greater Polish, Lesser Polish, and Silesian dialects; Kashubian is often regarded as a separate language but remains closely related to polszczyzna. In Poland there is an ongoing process of standardization and normative guidance provided by institutions such as the Polish Language Council (Rada Języka Polskiego) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which issues recommendations on spelling, word usage, and grammar. The vocabulary has absorbed international terms, particularly from German, French, English and other languages, while preserving core Slavic lexicon. Polszczyzna is also present outside Poland through diasporic communities and minority language contexts in neighboring countries, where it often coexists with local languages and script.