OK, now we’re ready to take a look at the diverse world of Polish diacritics. Here’s a little hint:
- ogonek means little tail and is responsible for nasalizing vowel sounds – ą, ę;
- kreska (acute accent) means either palatalization as in ś, ć, ) or turns o into u;
- kropka (overdot) is only used with ż;
- the slash across letters is used only with ł
Here are the 9 Polish letters formed with diacritics:
- Ć – like ‘ch’ in China, except softer
EXAMPLE: This letter is most often found in infinitive verbs like pić (to drink), spać (to sleep), wstać (to get up).
- Ś – Again, this is like ‘sh’ in ‘shore’ only much softer.
EXAMPLE: ślub, śpiew meaning respectively wedding, singing
- Ń – this is a palatalized n, a sound close to the Spanish ñ, but you’ll find it also in ‘onion’.
EXAMPLE: Famous director Roman Polański, even though English media often drop the ń
- Ź – has no English equivalent. It is very similar to Ż, except softer. The differentiation between soft and hard consonants is one of the hardest features to conquer, but fortunately people will understand you even if you can’t quite pull them off.
EXAMPLE: The surname Woźniak
- CI, SI, ZI, NI – Please note that the four abovementioned phonemes (ć,ś, ź and ń) have an alternative notation. When standing before a vowel they are written as ci, si, zi, ni, but they sound the same.
EXAMPLE: The common Polish surname Zieliński is pronounced ‘zhel-een’skee, with the ź sound at the beginning
- Ó – looks like ‘o’ but you pronounce it as English /oo/, as in moon. This means it is pronounced just the same as Polish u.
TRIVIA: Ó is the bane of Polish schoolchildren, who never know if a word is written with ó or u, but etymologically speaking, it is very useful. Basically ó is a sign that centuries earlier, this was still a regular o sound. One of such examles is król (king). Knowing this, one can correctly deduce that it comes from the name Karol (Carolus, or Karl) – the emperor of Franks and the one time Europe’s most powerful ruler went on to become the generic name for king in many languages in eastern and Central Europe (Compare: Czech král, Croatian Kralj, Russian король, Lithuanian karalius and Hungarian Király).
- Ż – [ʒ] /zh/, like “s” in the English word “measure”, pronounced exactly like ‘rz’ (see below).
EXAMPLE: żyrafa a giraffe.
- Ą – one of the two nasal sounds preserved in Polish. Interestingly, the sound represented by Ą is not a nasal A, but rather nasal O (which would make a different notation (ǫ) more sensible). It sounds more or less like ‘on’ in ‘wrong.‘
EXAMPLES: Polish doughnuts are called pączki and have recently become trendy in the Western world, where they are sometimes anglicised as ‘ponchki’
- Ę – a nasal E, most often encountered as the ending of first person singular conjugation, but when it is at the end of a word, it is almost inaudible. In the middle of a word, it sounds like ‘in’ in ‘bin.‘
EXAMPLE: Dziękuję, the Polish word for ‘thank you’
TRIVIA: Polish and Kashubian are the only two Slavic languages to have preserved the historic nasal vowels, which were once typical for all Slavic languages. In laguages like Compare Pol. dąb (oak) and Russian Дуб (dub), Polish ręka (hand) and Rus. рука (ruka).
- Ł – The mysterious ł with a slash is pronounced like an English ‘w’ like in the word ‘wool.‘
EXAMPLE: Forget the English pronunciation of Wałęsa, and try to say it the Polish way!
TRIVIA: Until very recently, ł was pronounced more or less like an English l – the so-called dark l.You can still find older people in Poland who say it like that, but if anyone below 80 pronounces ł in prewar fashion, it, sounds cheesy..
Now, you know all the letters using diacritic signs, which means you are ready to pronounce a test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters:
Zażółć gęślą jaźń
(Don’t worry about the meaning, it’s nonsense)
Step 3. Digraphs and Trigraph
