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Polish (''język polski'', ''polszczyzna'') 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.〔Nationalencyklopedin "Världens 100 största språk 2007" The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007〕 == History == The originality of Polish culture is tied to its language and to its Slavonic roots. Linguistic studies indicate that 5000 to 4000 years ago early Balto-Slavic languages were part of the Aryan or the Eastern Indo-European languages. Over 3500 years ago, the languages of the Balto-Slavs separated from the Aryan languages; some 3000 years ago, the Baltic and Slavic languages separated from each other; and for the next 1500 years, the Slavic languages evolved parallel to the Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, and other languages. The evolution of the Polish language occurred during the following 1500 years. Polish began to emerge around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state. Mieszko I, ruler of the Polans tribe from Greater Poland region, united a few culturally and linguistically related tribes from the basins of the Vistula and Odra before eventually accepting baptism in 966. With Christianity, Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet, which made it possible to write down Polish, until then existing only as a spoken language. The precursor to modern Polish is the Old Polish language. Ultimately, Polish is thought to descend from the unattested Proto-Slavic language. Polish was a ''lingua franca'' from 1500-1700 in small parts of Central and large portions of Eastern Europe, because of the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Polish language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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