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This video was recorded by Marta Sawicka in Poland. Polish is the official language of Poland and one of the official languages of the European Union. Polish has been influenced heavily by German, with loanwords and grammatical structures from Latin and French. It has at least three recognized varieties: Greater Polish, Lesser Polish, and Masovian, each of which is closely related due to the unfolding and aftermath of World War II. In fact, much of the modern linguistic situation and distribution of Polish speakers is a result of the territorial exchanges following the second world war, in which Polish refugees were resettled in the recovered territories of west and north Poland that had been predominantly German speaking. This process rendered Poland the most linguistically homogeneous European country, with almost 97% of Poland's citizens speaking the Polish language today. Polish has significant speaker populations in Canada, the United States, England, Wales, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Polish is spoken by almost 50 million people worldwide. It is a Lechitic language within the West Slavic grouping of the Indo-European language family.
ENGLISH TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, my name is Marta Sawicka and I come from Poland. I’ve always liked Polish language very much and I think it’s mainly because how hard and complicated it is and how it’s always fascinated me. Even though we have one present tense, one future tense and one past tense, we have both declination and conjugation which include very difficult forms and many exceptions. Polish people just basically love to change the endings of the word and make life harder. Our orthography also isn’t the easiest one. Maybe it’s just my lack of education, yet I don’t know if there is any other language with something alike our ó and u or rz and ż. Our pronunciation isn’t the easiest one neither and I don’t mean only the typical Polish digraphs (like sz or cz) but also the other sound clusters that are a big problem for foreigners. Talking about the sound of Polish, that probably is the other main reason why I like Polish language. However recently I had some doubts about whether Polish for the way it sounds or is it because I’m so used to it and that’s why I say it’s pretty? Maybe I’m just amazed by Mickiewicz and Słowacki and maybe my inner patriotism tells me to say Polish is pretty? Because lately I’ve been watching some videos on YouTube of people speaking other Slavic languages like Belarusian, Russian or Macedonian and to be honest I didn’t like non of them. So maybe if I weren’t Polish, but from other country, I would think that Polish is also ugly? I don’t know and I’ll probably never know, but if you have any ideas or comments you’d like to share I will be happy to read them in comments down below. Thank you very much, bye.
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