member of the West Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages ). Polish is spoken as a first language by about 38 million people in Poland, where it is the official language; by more than 1 million in the other countries of E Europe; and by about 1 million in North America. The Polish language is written in the Roman alphabet augmented by the use of diacritical marks. 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). The verb is inflected to indicate gender as well as person and number, and can do so without the use of the personal pronoun. …