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Polish language
Polish belongs to the West branch of Slavic languages and is spoken by 43 million people in 16 countries. The majority of people who have Polish as their mothertoungue live in Poland, making this country one of the most homogeneous in terms of mothertoungue. There are large minorities of Polish speakers in Lithania, Belarus and Ukraine, three territories of ex-URSS which Polish people didn't manage to leave after World War II.History
Polish has always been influenced by foreign languages. Since medieval time, due to heavy contacts with the Germans, it borrowed loanwords from German that still exist today, for instance "ratusz" (Rathaus=town hall) or "handel" (Handel=commerce). During the Napoleon era, Polish absorbed French terms such as "ekran" (écran=screen) or "meble" (meuble=furniture). When borrowing international words, Polish often changes their spelling. For example, the Latin suffix spelled '-tion' in English corresponds to '-cja'. Examples of this include "inauguracja" (inauguration), dewastacja (devastation), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (connotations).Standard Polish began to became more homogeneous after World War II, as the result of mass migrations and mass education, although regional dialects persisted, particularly in the South and South-West in the hilly areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. In the Western and Northern territories, resettled in large measure by Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union, the older generation speaks a dialect of Polish characteristic of the former eastern provinces.
Dialects
Polish has a variety of dialects, which correspond to old tribal divisions. The main dialects are Great Polish, which was the language of the tribes which lived in the West, Little Polish, which developed in the South-East, the Mazovian, spoken in the Centre-East and the Silesian, typical of the South-West part of the region. One difference between the different variations concerns pronunciation, as in Sileasian nasal consonants were not pronounced as nasals, a phenomenum which on the contrary occurs in Mazovian. There were also variations in vocabulary, as Little Polish inherited many words from Old Polish. Apart from dialects, there also are regional, now extinted variations, as the dialect of Warsaw, upon which Modern standard Polish is based.The modern language has formed from the process of mixing of various communities which occurred after 1945, when the Socialist Government started a policy which had the aim of suppressing the development of social communities. The communities were obliged to move around the country, so that the different dialects started to merge and contributed to the standardization of modern Polish.
Literature
The Golden Age of Polish Literature was the Renaissance Period, when writers as Jan Dantyszek or Andrzej Krzycki wrote in Latin and were greatly influenced by the Italian humanists. Other contacts with Europe came in the Enlightment Period, when the influence of English or French literature gave rise to new forms of writing, such as drama, novel, the publication of the first Polish dictionary and, in poetry, the introduction of "dumy" (ballads).The Romantic period has been considered the greatest period in Polish literature. It coincided with the loss of independence and writers as Mickiewicz or Slowacki expressed their feelings and mood in new forms of drama and sonnet. Following the suppression of the insurrection of 1830-31, the cultural elite was exiled to France and the works written in this period reflected a struggle between opposed worlds of aristocracy and disinherited masses. Twenthieth-century literature was dominated by the "Young Poland Movement", also called Neoromanticism as it expressed the desire to return to immagination in literature as opposed to Positivism. Leaders of the movement were Antoni Lange, a poet, and Zenon Przesmycki (pseudonym Miriam), editor of a Symbolist review, Chimera.