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Poland Languages
Beginning with the early postwar years, Polish has been
the
language of all but a very few citizens. Grouped with
Czech and
Slovak in the West Slavic subgroup of the Slavonic
linguistic
family, Polish uses a Latin alphabet because the Roman
Catholic
Church has been dominant in Poland since the tenth century
(see The Origins of Poland
, ch. 1). Documents written in Polish
survive from the fourteenth century; however, the literary
language largely developed during the sixteenth century in
response to Western religious and humanistic ideas and the
availability of printed materials. In the eighteenth
century, the
Enlightenment stimulated a second period of advances in
the
literary language. When the Polish state fell at the end
of the
eighteenth century, the language played an important role
in
maintaining the Polish national identity
(see
The Three Partitions, 1764-95
, ch. 1).
Although modern Polish was homogenized by widespread
education, distribution of literature, and the flourishing
of the
mass media, several dialects originating in tribal
settlement
patterns survived this process in the late twentieth
century.
Among the most significant are Greater Polish and Lesser
Polish
(upon a combination of which the literary language was
formed),
Silesian, Mazovian, and Kashubian, which is sometimes
classified
as a separate language.
Data as of October 1992
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