Polish Audio & Video Translation Services

Watch an interview with  Julia, one of our best Polish Voice Over Artists.

You can also check out this blog post about Polish Dialects and Languages. Knowing them is crucial before starting an English to Polish Translation Project!

Polish is a Slavic language spoken primarily in Poland and the native language of the Poles. It belongs to the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages. Polish is the official language of Poland, but it is also used throughout the world by Polish minorities in other countries. It is one of the official languages of the European Union. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet, which has 9 additions to the letters of the basic Latin script (ą,ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż). Polish is closely related to Kashubian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, Czech and Slovak.

Although the Austrian, German and Russian administrations exerted much pressure on the Polish nation (during the 19th and early 20th centuries) following the Partitions of Poland, which resulted in attempts to suppress the Polish language, a rich literature has regardless developed over the centuries and the language currently has the largest number of speakers of the West Slavic group. It is also the second most widely spoken Slavic language, after Russian and just ahead of Ukrainian, which comes third.

In history, Polish is known to be an important language, both diplomatically and academically in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, Polish is spoken by over 38.5 million people as their first language in Poland. It is also spoken as a second language in western parts of Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine, as well as northern parts of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II, millions of Polish speakers can be found in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. There are 40 million Polish language speakers around the world.

The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the Soviet annexation of the Kresy in 1939, and the acquisition of former German territory after World War II. This tendency toward a homogeneity also stems from the vertically integrated nature of the authoritarian Polish People’s Republic.

The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak “standard” Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between regional dialects appear slight. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing regional variations.

Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country; nearly 97% of Poland’s citizens declare Polish as their native language. Elsewhere, ethnic Poles constitute large minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuania’s Vilnius (Wilno) County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results, with Wilno (Vilnius) having been part of Poland until 1939) and is found elsewhere in south-eastern Lithuania. In Ukraine it is most common in the western Lwów (Lviv) and Wołyń (Volyn) oblast (provinces), while in Western Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border.