The native idiom of illustrious personalities like Copernicus, Chopin, Roman Polanski and Marie Curie, Polish is spoken as a first language by more than 38 million people in Poland, by more than one million in the other countries of Eastern Europe and by another million in North America.

The Polish language is written in the Roman alphabet augmented by the use of diacritical marks (special characters). It is extremely rich phonetically, having 10 vowels and 35 consonants. In pronunciation, the stress is normally placed on the penultimate syllable of a word.

A distinctive feature is the preservation in spoken Polish of the nasal vowels which are no longer found in the other modern Slavic tongues. As in Czech, the nouns, pronouns, and adjectives have seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, and locative), meaning that the ending of the words varies according to their syntactical function in the sentence.