22 Life
Language Polish is spoken by some 50 million people around the globe, including virtually all Polish citizens and a diaspora in Europe and North America. London, Dublin and Chicago are the biggest Polish centres outside Poland’s borders It is definitely one of THOSE languages that sound opaque to the rest of the world. Luckily, words describing technological advances, like radio, telewizja, komputer, telefon, not to mention internet, look and in most cases, sound familiar. Names of institutions like poczta, biblioteka, restauracja or hotel are equally comprehensible. Add to it the vocabulary influenced by French or Latin, from the broad field of humanities, medicine and politics: filozofia, migrena, parlament. Thank people who reinvented Polish as a modern language in the 19th and 20th centuries and kindly decided not to construct Polish-sounding words for various imports and novelties, as was the case in Finland, where telephone is a puhelin. Luckily, there are Polish and international equivalents for some words. You can choose between seeing a doktor and a lekarz, seeing a theatre spektakl or a przedstawienie. One can trace different cultural influences on Poland by the provenance of words. For instance, a lot of vocabulary that has to do with civic culture is of German origin, as it was imported in the Middle Ages together with the know-how on founding and running cities, for instance ratusz (city hall, stemming from Rathaus) or burmistrz (mayor, from Bürgermeister). Naturally, English is the biggest influence nowadays, with words like blog, hipster, hamburger and modem that go mainstream overnight, much to the horror of purists. Things get worse (for you) once you try to decode words describing everyday, familiar things. Most of these have ancient names that sound familiar only to those Europeans who speak other Slavic languages, such as Czech, Slovak and Slovenian, and to the citizens of Baltic countries who still remember their mandatory Russian from school. How about a slice of chleb? Or a glass of woda? Confused? That was just bread and water. If you are too shy to try your Polish you can always order sushi and wino, but sometimes there is no choice. When travelling from Kraków to Warsaw you can take a pociąg, a samochód or a samolot, a train, a car or a plane. When strolling around a miasto (city or town), you take an ulica (street), pass by a dom (house) with a sklep (shop) downstairs, to reach a plac (square – that should look familiar to Northern Europeans) or a rynek (market square). There you will meet a mężczyzna (man) or a kobieta (woman) for a kawa