Marta speaking Polish
This video was recorded by Marta Sawicka in Bedford, UK. Polish is the official language of Poland and one of the official languages of the European Union. Polish has been influenced heavily by German, with loanwords and grammatical structures from Latin and French. It has at least three recognized varieties: Greater Polish, Lesser Polish, and Masovian, each of which is closely related due to the unfolding and aftermath of World War II. In fact, much of the modern linguistic situation and distribution of Polish speakers is a result of the territorial exchanges following the second world war, in which Polish refugees were resettled in the recovered territories of west and north Poland that had been predominantly German speaking. This process rendered Poland the most linguistically homogeneous European country, with almost 97% of Poland's citizens speaking the Polish language today. Polish has significant speaker populations in Canada, the United States, England, Wales, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Polish is spoken by almost 50 million people worldwide. It is a Lechitic language within the West Slavic grouping of the Indo-European language family.