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Yup Polish is actually quite regular in pronunciation, there are very few exceptions and only about a dozen rules to remember to be able to pronounce any word.

The reputation comes from different conventions. In English letter+h is the escape code (gh, th, sh, ch) in Polish it's letter+z (rz,sz,cz,dz,dż,dź,dzi).

Especially vowels are much easier than in English. Each vowel in Polish maps to exactly one sound and vice versa.

> y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english

it's the English short i like in bIt. As is the rule- Polish has a special letter for that sound and English has 2 sounds encoded the same way and you have to remember which is which :)

Another difference is that Polish j is English y. And English j is Polish dż (dżungla = jungle).

ń is the same sound as the funny n in Spanish word for Spain: España

> w is v [..] Always, no exceptions and never anything else

There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers don't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :) And if you ignore it you are fine, it sounds unnatural but it's still correct. Like saying "I am" instead of "I'm" in English.

BTW I think all that additional complexity in English writing system is the reason you have to teach kids to read for so long. In Polish kids are usually taught reading in preschool or first class at school and they are expected to be able to correctly read any text after 6 months to 1 year.

There are some gotchas the other way around (hear something and write it) because that way the mapping isn't unique (there are sounds that have 2 ways to write them), but reading is easy.

>There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers doesn't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :)

Well, true, but I don't think devoicing w in 'Levandofski' is correct, sounds a bit sloppy but hard to hear the distinction to be honest so maybe

There is though a clear devoicing not only before the last syllable but before 'sz' as in 'wszystko'(all), 'wszędzie'(everywhere). Not sure if there's a surname that that applies to.

Wszystko and Lewandowski both are subjected to the same principle, namely: in Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_d...

Yup, thanks, that's the rule.

I think I should change the 99.99% in my original post to 98%

I wouldn't be so strict with it to be honest — it is still a rule that is internally consistent, and as far as I know it lacks any significant exceptions.

I wonder if there is a rule that lets people get away with "Lewandoski" :)

Rule of thumb of consonant clusters in mos languages: break the cluster. Don't try to pronounce "VSK" directly. Instead, split it and add different parts to syllables before and after: Le-van-dov-ski. Adding "ski" after the word is much easier than dealing with three consonants in a row

There is, it’s called „dialekt małopolski” ;)

Ej, co kurwa? Jeszcze mi powiesz że wychodzi się na dwór a nie na pole ;)

To elaborate on ⟨ł⟩ – there is quite a good reason for the way it is spelled. Originally, its pronunciation was /ɫ/ (“dark l” in English) so it was very close to /l/ in sound quality.

It evolved to /w/ over time. During the first part of 20th century, it was already used only in dialects and by professionals such as actors and singers (because of it, it is also called “scenic ł” — „sceniczne ł”).

Ironically, if I remember correctly the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/, so in some roundabout way you could say that English and Polish both swapped traditional pronunciation of their letters.

⟨y⟩ is often transcribed as /ɨ/ but it is in practice closer to English schwa.

And to correct one thing: because of Polish orthography rules, ⟨w⟩ can also be pronounced:

• as /f/ if preceding consonants are voiceless as in the second w in Lewando__w__ski, although I think one would still be understood if that rule was ignored

• as /w/ if the word is an English loanword, as in „weekend” /wikɛnt/

the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/

IIRC, there wasn't a U letter in Latin, so the vowel was written as V. I guess it tended to souns like W when starting a syllabe, as in versus.

> there wasn't a U letter in Latin

Yup they used V for both. This is probably why German (and then Polish) uses W instead of V - to distinguish it from U.

When the Latin alphabet was first used in Old English, Latin w had already come to be pronounced v. The was no need for it in English at that stage, because v was just considered a variant of f.

But English made good use of w, and there were two ways of writing the w sound: either as two u's (because that way you can indicate the consonantalness of it, even before consonants as in writan) or using the old rune wynn. The uu approach spread to the continent and Old High German (which still used the English sound) adopted it. Old High German also didn't have a v sound at that time, and v was considered a variant of f - which it still is in modern German (e.g. Vater = father, pronounced fah-ta). Meanwhile, uu fell out of use in England, and the runic wynn dominated. But the English spelling system was gradually replaced following the Norman invasion, which led w to dominate over wynn. And v was now considered its own sound, so the letter began to be used for a v sound. So even though English seems to be a bit of a exception, with w=/w/, it's a practice that came from England and came back to England and was a medieval norm.

But the w sound changed to v in German too. They didn't have such a radical interruption to their orthographic tradition as the English did, so the idea that V=F remained, and the letter w just come to be used for the new v sound. It spread from there.

So it's not really w instead of v to distinguish /v/ from /u/. It's more w instead of v to distinguish /w/ from v=/f/.

The crazy thing about that is it wasn't until several centuries after all that transpired that v and u became separate letters. So the Germans were using u for the sound of Buch and the sound of Uater (=Vater), and a different letter w for the sound of Wasser, when W and U=Buch were very similar and U=Buch and U=Vater were very different.

For south Slavic last names: č- "ch" as in cheddar or the choose so same as "cz" in polish ć - "tj" ...this one is hard, and only some dialects pronounce it differently enough so using "č" is good enough ž - same as "J" in french names "Jeanne d'Arc" or Jean-Luc Picard dž - same as "J" in the word "John" or "Jordan" or G in "George" đ - just use dž š - "sh" as in short

Do you guys also have the open/closed u distinction?

Nope. That is why people struggle with Danish o,ø,å,y,u and a,æ.

But in reality, at least for Croatia, the differences in dialects mean that in some dialects some words with "o" are pronounced as "ø", or "a" as "æ"...

Anyway, reading Slavic compared to English/Danish is a piece of cake. Grammar on the other hand...

Thank you very much for this summary! I have a lot of polish colleagues in my work, and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names aside from memorization (which I will promptly forget). This will definitively help me.

> and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names

No worries, give it your best approximation and if it's way off or if someone cares a bit too much they will correct you, use the corrected version since then and you're golden.

We know it may be hard, no problem whatsoever and no one cares, don't worry about it one bit and definitely don't feel bad about it. I think poles actually prefer if you say their name in 'english way' rather than super-correctly in polish because it sounds more natural instead of being suddenly jerked back into polish for a millisecond and then back into english. Just remember the 'w'->'v' and you will get a lot of street cred for free

Now practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4

> pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'.

FYI: "put" and "dude" have a different vowel sound in most dialects of English.

Yeah, that's why you can hear 'polish/slavic accent' because it's hard for us to say it differently

> It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'

Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If you pronounce Łukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as in 'wise' or 'weather'"

That's interesting, could you elaborate on the difference in 'w' between 'wise' and 'when'? I'd say 'Wookash' as in star-wars 'Wookie' is a good way (way, hehe) to say Łukasz.

I'm not a linguist though so I'm curious

Some English speakers pronounce "w" differently than "wh". They will say sth that sounds like "hwhen" instead of "when" for example. I think it's a dialect thing I only met like 5 people online who spoke like that but they were all native English speakers so it must be correct?

It’s “correct” but quite rare. The wh was originally a digraph pronounced with a voiceless labial–velar, but but most variants of English have undergone what linguists call the whine-wine merger so those words sound the same. Exceptions are Scots, Irish, and some Southern US varieties.

The guys I met are from Canada.

Obligatory Family Guy link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E

I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in real life who says "hwen", "hwere", etc., although you can hear it in some Johnny Cash songs. I'm not sure exactly where in America you can hear it - is it a southern thing? You'll never hear anyone say "hwen" in the UK.

IIRC the ‘History of English’ podcast mentions that pronunciation like ‘hwat’ was the norm either in Old English or before that. Then it changed, and the spelling was changed accordingly.

That's a much better example! I'm not sure how to accurately describe the w/wh difference in text. A comment in this thread suggested that it's like prepending a "h", like "hwhen" which is actually incorrect - this exists but it's what you'd do as part of an over-the-top impression of an old fashioned upper class accent :) In reality the pronunciation is just like blowing a tiny little bit of air when your mouth makes the shape for the "w". I didn't know it was largely just a Scottish/Irish thing nowadays, though.

Also while we're all gathered in our shared appreciation of pronunciation weirdness I have one more "wh" example. Where I'm from (Northeast Scotland) English words following a "wh-" pattern are transformed in the local dialect to be spelled and pronounced differently as "f-". So "fit" instead of "what" ("fit like?" = "how's it going"), "far" instead of "where" ("far dae ye bide" = "where do you live") etc. Dialects are weird :)

Also, if we are talking about aspiration, word-initial p and t are also left un-aspirated in Polish, contrary to many (most?) English dialects.

That is interesting, I can’t think how else to pronounce the word-initial “t”s in something like “Tu jest carrefour, a tu jest kurwa jeż” (a phrase that has entered the canon of my friend group) any other way, I wonder if I’m already saying it unaspirated.

:D

I'll be honest, I'm very interested in knowing how that polish phrase entered a Scotsman's, living in Czech Republic, canon and what it means

It's all down to this video where a Polish guy was amazed at a hedgehog he saw in some city centre somewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwR6KS6vJWg

Edit: oh and it means “Here’s the carrefour (supermarket chain), and here’s the fucking hedgehog”

Lol, first time I'm seeing this. But the very top recommendation from yt was 'Jeż kurwa - czeska parodia!'. I love how memes travel. I think the last very popular Czech meme in Poland was Jožin z bažin

Also, in Polish a regular 'c' is pronounced approximately like an English 'ts'

What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, because in German and English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).

Yeah, Łukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally online because the correct letters can be inferred from the context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were to pronounce it correctly though it would be something like 'Wookash' (which looks ridiculous in written form but hey)

> it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter

Is it still common? It was popular when there were many encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r in English :)

I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may be that I'm the only one

Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-correction turned on) or interacting with older systems and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it without them (ł → l, ą → a, etc.).

By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows username. It works, but every once in a while something third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.

'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else

I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused because what happens with stand-alone w, that seems to mean in. Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants :-m

It is quite funny, because when I was learning English, it was so bizarre that the first-person pronoun was only one letter (putting aside the required capitalization). On the other hand, having to write and instead of i still seems quite unwieldy to me.

Well in English it's actually 2 sounds (a+i) they just have them mixed into one letter :)

Not unlike Russian where the reversed R is the same sounds just in reversed order (i+a) and it also means I.

Polish prefers to have sounds separated so it's "ja". And it's never capitalized, English is very egocentric about it's pronouns :)

> First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants

Polish is quite tame with these as far as Slavic languages go. "Strč prst skrz krk" is a proper sentence in Czech and Slovak :)

Romanian has the opposite oddity: we have whole words made up of vowels, with a proper sentence like that: "Aia e o oaie" ("that is a sheep", pronounced roughly 'ah-ya ye awe wa-ye').

Except in most Slavic languages r can work as a vowel.

(if you are confused think about how the y in year is a vowel sound but works as a consonant in the syllable)

Y in year does not represent a vowel sound.

Phonetically, it is a vowel (a sound produced with an open vowel tract), but phonologically, it is a consonant (a sound that forms the onset of a syllable).

English has a couple of pure examples: 'Mrs' and 'Nth' I can think of.

You can extend this with exclamations/onomatopoeia (eg: 'hmm', 'shh', 'brr'), but can see that these are not 'normal words'.

Interjections can contain sounds that don't occur in ordinary words. In German there's "tja", and in English there's "tsk", which is a click, quite an unusual sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_click

I took a Ukrainian class but this also applies to Polish:

The tip they gave English speakers for pronouncing "szcz", was that it sounded like the sh-ch connection between the words "Fresh Cheese".

Ironically, I didn't know how to pronounce it properly until then and it's in my last name! I always anglicized its pronunciation to "sha".

What about rz, is it same as ř in Czech? Good luck with this letter to any native English speaker. :-))

No, it's either the same as "ż" (in most cases) or the same as "sz" (after devoiced consonants). And there's like 3 words where it's pronounced as separate r and z letters (tarzan, marznąć, I don't remember the 3rd :) ).

no, it traces back to the same thing pretty much, but in modern Polish it's indistinguishable from ż (ž?) I assume that long time ago it went like this r' -> ř -> řż -> ż, which effectively removed the foundational r-ness of the thing.

Off the top of my head, the Polish language has lost the phonetic distinction between

rz and ż -> ż,

h and ch -> ch,

u and ó (flat u vs long o) -> u

In some regional dialects near southern/eastern borders you could still find some of these distinctions, but in modern Polish it's gone.

at a glance shit looks unnecessarily confusing especially for non-slavic foreigners, but once you look more into it explains many things and helps greatly with writing of related words, declination and conjugation, eg where grammar mandates sound substitution (assuming you are Czech you are probably aware of this effect already) For example there are clusters of sounds that often change one into another.

g/h/ż are one such cluster of closely related sounds

noga (leg, noun) vs nożny (adjective)

drugi (second) vs druh (friend, companion) drużba (guy helping the newlyweds with wedding)

Sapieha (noble name of Ukrainian origin) vs Sapieżanka (daughter of Sapieha)

rz/r:

drzewo (tree) vs drewno (wood)

ch/sz is another:

mucha (fly) -> muszka (diminutive)

ó/o/e is another:

bóg (god) vs bożek (lesser god)

pióro (feather) vs pierzyna (bed cover stuffed with feathers)

It also helps seeing similarities between Slavic languages, as this stuff preserves a ton of the common roots. Any Slav seeing 'góra' will know what's up, not so much with phonetically equivalent 'gura'.

there is still distinction between ř and ž in Czech and it would be noticable to native speaker, though I guess non-native speakers would not notice the difference, same can't be said about Slovak ä vs e unless you try to speak extremely clearly and pronounce very hard (which would look odd), for most of the people ä was completely replaced with e

dřevo in Czech is actually drevo in Slovak

noga, drugi, bog, you can in all replace g with H and you will have CZ/SK version, seems Polish is in this aspect way closer to Russian with overused G instead H

ż has the sound of soft g, as in germs

g in germs would be "dż" not "ż" in Polish. Same sound as j in English - for example in "jungle" (dżungla in Polish). As usual - English encodes it in many ways Polish always as "dż".

Polish "ż" without "d" before it is more like French j for example in "je taim".

Sorry but it's « je t'aime »

Żak = Jacques in French. Which is easier?