Polish phonology


The phonological system of the Polish language is similar in many ways to those of other Slavic languages, although there are some characteristic features found in only a few other languages of the family, such as contrasting retroflex and palatal fricatives and affricates, and nasal vowels. The vowel system is relatively simple, with just six oral monophthongs and two nasals, while the consonant system is much more complex.

Vowels

The Polish vowel system consists of six oral monophthongs and two nasal diphthongs. Vowel nasality in Polish is partially preserved from Proto-Slavic, having been lost in most other modern Slavic languages.
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

Close vowels

IPAPolish scriptExample
i
e
y
a
u/ó
o
ę
ą

Nasal vowels do not feature uniform nasality over their duration. Phonetically, they consist of an oral vowel followed by a nasal semivowel. Therefore, they are phonetically diphthongs. are also less commonly transcribed respectively, such as by the PWN-Oxford Polish-English Dictionary.

Distribution

The vowels and have largely complementary distribution. Either vowel may follow a labial consonant, as in mi and my. Elsewhere, however, is usually restricted to word-initial position and positions after palatal consonants and the palatalized velars, while cannot appear in those positions. In some phonological descriptions of Polish that make a phonemic distinction between palatized and unpalatized labials, and may thus be treated as allophones of a single phoneme. However, appears outside its usual positions in some foreign-derived words, as in czipsy and tir. In the past, was closer to, which is acoustically more similar to.
Nasal vowels do not occur except before a fricative and in word-final position. When the letters ą and ę appear before stops and affricates, they indicate an oral or followed by a nasal consonant homorganic with the following consonant. For example, kąt is , gęba is, and pięć is, as if they were spelled *kont, *gemba, and *pieńć. Before or, nasality is lost altogether and the vowels are pronounced as oral or. It is also very common to denasalize to in word-final position, as in "I will be".
An alternative analysis postulates that nasal vowels no longer exist in Standard Polish as independent phonemes because they are realized as actual nasal consonants before stops and affricates, and their nasal-diphthong realization before fricatives can be analyzed as an allophonic realization of the sequences, or likewise. Moreover, studies indicate that the nasalization of the presumed nasal diphthongs ą and ę is no longer distinctive to native speakers in word-final position either and is retained only in emphatic, hypercorrect or artificial speech.

Historical development

Distinctive vowel length was inherited from late Proto-Slavic, with some changes. Additional vowel lengths were introduced in Proto-Polish as a result of compensatory lengthening when a yer in the next syllable disappeared. If a yer disappeared, the preceding vowel became long.
This system of vowel lengths is well preserved in Czech and to a lesser degree in Slovak. In the emerging modern Polish, however, the long vowels were shortened again but sometimes with a change in quality. The latter changes came to be incorporated into the standard language only in the case of long o and the long nasal vowel, mostly for vowels located before voiced obstruents. The vowel shift may thus be presented as follows:
Note that the that was once a long is still distinguished in script as ó. Former long was written é until the 19th century.
In most circumstances, consonants were palatalized when followed by an original front vowel, including the soft yer that was often later lost. For example: *dьnь became dzień, while *dьnьmъ became dniem.
Nasal vowels *ę and *ǫ of late Proto-Slavic merged to become the medieval Polish vowel, written ø. Like other Polish vowels, it developed long and short variants. The short variant developed into present-day ę, while the long form became, written ą, as described above. Overall:
The historical shifts are the reason for the alternations o:ó and ę:ą commonly encountered in Polish morphology: *rogъ became róg due to the loss of the following yer, and the instrumental case of the same word went from *rogъmъ to rogiem. Similarly, *dǫbъ became dąb, and in the instrumental case, *dǫbъmъ the vowel remained short, causing the modern dębem.

Dialectal variation

differ particularly in their realization of nasal vowels, both in terms of whether and when they are decomposed to an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant and in terms of the quality of the vowels used.
Also, some dialects preserve nonstandard developments of historical long vowels ; for example, a may be pronounced with in words in which it was historically long.

Consonants

The Polish consonant system is more complicated; its characteristic features include the series of affricates and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalizations and two further palatalizations that took place in Polish and Belarusian.
The consonant phonemes of Polish are as follows:
Alveolar are allophones of before. Denti-alveolar is an allophone of before dental consonants. has been traditionally classified as a trill, with a tap supposedly only occurring as an allophone or in fast speech however, more recent studies show that /r/ is predominantly realized as a tap, sometimes as an approximant or a fricative, but almost never as a trill. One study found that in an intervocalic context a trilled occurs in less than 3% of cases, while a tapped occurred in approximately 95% of cases. Another study by the same researcher showed that in a postconsonantal position, /r/ is realized as a tapped in 80-90% of cases, while trilled occurs in just 1.5% of articulations.
The fricatives and affricates shown as retroflex may instead be transcribed as palato-alveolar consonants with, etc. However, they are more accurately described as retroflex although they are laminal. They may therefore also be transcribed phonetically with the symbols etc., indicating the laminal feature.
The phonemes and are less commonly transcribed as and .
IPAPolish scriptExampleIPAPolish scriptExample
m dź/dz
b ć/c
p ż/rz
w sz
f dż
n cz
d ń/n
t g
z k
s g
dz k,
c h/ch,
r j
l, ł,
ź/z h/ch,
ś/s

The laminal retroflex sounds ' and the corresponding alveolo-palatals ' both sound similar to the English palato-alveolar consonants. The alveolo-palatals are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised to the palate. The series are known as "rustling" ' and "humming" ' respectively; the equivalent alveolar series ' is called "hissing" '.
Polish contrasts affricates and stop–fricative clusters by the fricatives being longer in clusters than in affricates:
The distinction is lost in some Lesser Polish dialects.
For the possibility of an additional glottal fricative phoneme for h, see § Dialectal variation below.

Allophony

has a voiced allophone, which occurs whenever is followed by a voiced obstruent, in accordance with the rules given under § Voicing and devoicing below. For example, dach is, but dach domu is.
has the strongest friction before consonants, weaker friction before vowels and weakest friction intervocalically, where it may be realized as glottal .
has a velar allophone,, which occurs before velar consonants.
Non-palatal consonants are weakly palatalized when they precede, but it is far less audible than it is in Russian.
The approximants and may be regarded as non-syllabic vowels when they are not followed by a vowel. For example, raj , dał , autor .
Before fricatives, nasal consonants may be realized as nasalized semivowels, analogous to and . This occurs in loanwords, and in free variation with the typical consonantal pronunciation. Similarly, the palatal nasal in coda position is in free variation with a nasalized palatal approximant. For example, koń, Gdańsk

Distribution

Polish, like other Slavic languages, permits complex consonant clusters, which often arose from the disappearance of yers. Polish can have word-initial and word-medial clusters of up to four consonants, whereas word-final clusters can have up to five consonants. Examples of such clusters can be found in words such as bezwzględny , źdźbło , , and krnąbrność . A popular Polish tongue-twister is .
For the restrictions on combinations of voiced and voiceless consonants in clusters, see § Voicing and devoicing below. Unlike languages such as Czech, Polish does not have syllabic consonants: the nucleus of a syllable is always a vowel.
The consonant is restricted to positions adjacent to a vowel. It also cannot precede i or y.

Voicing and devoicing

Polish obstruents are subject to voicing and devoicing in certain positions. This leads to neutralization of voiced/voiceless pairs in those positions. The phenomenon applies in word-final position and in consonant clusters.
In Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless. To determine whether a given cluster has voiced or voiceless obstruents, the last obstruent in the cluster, excluding w or rz, should be examined to see if appears to be voiced or voiceless. The consonants n, m, ń, r, j, l, ł do not represent obstruents and so do not affect the voicing of other consonants; they are also usually not subject to devoicing except when surrounded by unvoiced consonants. Some examples follow :
In some dialects of Wielkopolska and the eastern borderlands, remains voiced after voiceless consonants.
The above rule does not apply to sonorants: a consonant cluster may contain voiced sonorants and voiceless obstruents, as in , , słoń, tnąc.
At the end of a word, obstruents are pronounced voiceless. For example, the in bóg is pronounced, and the in zajazd represents a pronunciation like. However, in some regional dialects, especially in western and southern Poland, final obstruents are voiced if the following word starts with a sonorant.

Hard and soft consonants

Multiple palatalizations and some depalatalizations that took place in the history of Proto-Slavic and Polish have created quite a complex system of what are often called 'soft' and 'hard' consonants. These terms are useful in describing some inflection patterns and other morphological processes, but exact definitions of 'soft' and 'hard' may differ somewhat.
'Soft' generally refers to the palatal nature of a consonant. The alveolo-palatal sounds ń, ś, ź, ć, dź are considered soft, as normally is the palatal j. The l sound is also normally classed as a soft consonant: like the preceding sounds, it cannot be followed by y but takes i instead. The palatalized velars, and might also be regarded as soft on this basis.
Consonants not classified as soft are dubbed 'hard'. However, a subset of hard consonants, c, dz, sz, ż/rz, cz, dż, often derive from historical palatalizations and behaves like the soft consonants in some respects. These sounds may be called 'hardened' or 'historically soft' consonants.
In some phonological descriptions of Polish, however, a greater number of consonants, including especially the labials m, p, b, f, w, are regarded as occurring in 'hard' and 'soft' pairs. In this approach, for example, the word pies is analysed not as but as, with a soft. These consonants are then also analysed as soft when they precede the vowel , although here the palatalization is hardly audible. Unlike their equivalents in Russian, these consonants cannot retain their softness in the syllable coda. For example, the word for 'carp' has the inflected forms karpia, karpie etc., with soft , but the nominative singular is karp, with a hard.
The consonants t, d, r can also be regarded as having hard and soft forms according to the above approach, although the soft forms occur only in loanwords such as tir . If the distinction is made for all relevant consonants, then y and i can be regarded as allophones of a single phoneme, with y following hard consonants and i following soft ones.
The historical palatalized forms of some consonants have developed in Polish into noticeably different sounds: historical palatalized t, d, r have become the sounds now represented by ć, dź, rz respectively. Similarly palatalized s, z, n became the sounds ś, ź, ń. The palatalization of labials has resulted in the addition of, as in the example pies just given. These developments are reflected in some regular morphological changes in Polish grammar, such as in noun declension.

Glottal stop

In more contemporary Polish, a phonetic glottal stop may appear as the onset of a vowel-initial word, though this can be hard to detect. It may also appear following word-final vowels to connotate particular affects; for example, nie is normally pronounced, but may instead be pronounced or in a prolonged interrupted. This intervocalic glottal stop may also break up a vowel hiatus, even when one appears morpheme-internally, as in poeta or Ukraina . A relatively new phenomenon in Polish is the expansion of the usage of glottal stops. In the past, initial vowels were pronounced with an initial voiceless glottal fricative, pre-iotation, or pre-labialization.

Dialectal variation

In some Polish dialects there is an additional voiced glottal fricative, represented by the letter. In standard Polish, both and represent.
Some eastern dialects also preserve the velarized dental lateral approximant,, which corresponds with in standard Polish. Those dialects also can palatalize in every position, but standard Polish does so only allophonically before and. and are also common realizations in native speakers of Polish from Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
notes that students of Polish philology were hostile towards the lateral variant of, saying that it sounded "unnatural" and "awful". Some of the students also said that they perceived the lateral as a variant of, which, he further notes, along with the necessity of deciding from context whether the sound meant was or, made people hostile towards the sound. On the other hand, some Poles view the lateral variant with nostalgia, associating it with the elegant culture of interwar Poland.
In the Masurian dialect and some neighbouring dialects, mazurzenie occurs: retroflex merge with the corresponding dentals unless is spelled .

Prosody

The predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate: the second-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress: in a four-syllable word, if the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first.
Each vowel represents one syllable although the letter i normally does not represent a vowel when it precedes another vowel. Also, the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels after another vowel, as in autor , mostly in loanwords.
Some loanwords, particularly from classical languages, have the stress on the antepenultimate syllable. For example, fizyka is stressed on the first syllable. That may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement: muzyka 'music' vs. muzyka - genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When additional syllables are added to such words through inflection or suffixation, the stress normally becomes regular: uniwersytet has irregular stress on the third syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu and derived adjective uniwersytecki have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Over time, loanwords become nativized to have a penultimate stress.
Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy etc. Those endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress: zrobiłbym is stressed on the first syllable and zrobilibyśmy on the second. According to prescriptive grammars, the same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech. The irregular stress patterns are explained by the fact that these endings are detachable clitics rather than true verbal inflections: for example, instead of kogo zobaczyliście? it is possible to say kogoście zobaczyli? – here kogo retains its usual stress in spite of the attachment of the clitic. Reanalysis of the endings as inflections when attached to verbs causes the different colloquial stress patterns.
Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were a single word. That applies in particular to many combinations of preposition plus a personal pronoun, such as do niej, na nas, przeze mnie, all stressed on the bolded syllable.