The Polish language is spoken by around 35-40 million speakers in the country of Poland (offical name: RZECZPOSPOLITA POLSKA Republic of Poland). The capital city is Warsaw, with a population of over 1.7 million and growing. Poland is bounded on the north by the Baltic Sea; on the west by Germany (where the natural boundary is the Oder (ODRA) River); on the south by the Czech Republic and Slovakia (where the natural boundary is formed by the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains); on the east by Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania); and, in the northeast, by a fragment of Russia. In addition to Poland, Polish is spoken to one or another extent by several million people outside Poland in Western Europe; in South and especially North America; and in such countries as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Polish ranks 17th among world languages as to number of speakers.

Polish belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European languages. Among the major Slavic languages Polish is most closely allied with Slovak and Czech, and also has many features in common with Ukrainian, an East Slavic language with which it has been in close contact for centuries. Christianity was brought to Poland by Czech missionaries and was adopted under the Polish ruler Mieszko I in 966. The earliest Polish writing goes back to the 14th- 15th centuries. The Polish language attained status as a means of accomplished literary expression by individual writers in the 16th century, and attained full maturity as a language of education, science, jurisprudence, public debate, and other broad social functions in the 17th-18th centuries. The boundaries of Poland have undergone many changes over its history, including a period in the 18th and 19th centuries when the country was entirely incorporated into the territories of its neighbors. Present-day Poland resembles in large part the shape of Polish lands in the Middle Ages. Contemporary Standard Polish, based in the main on the Warsaw variant of the language, is spoken or at least understood over the entire country. Due to mass education and communication, together with sizable movements in population from one part of the country to another, especially following the Second World War, the standard language has largely replaced strikingly different regional varieties. The most significant regional dialect is that of the Kraków-Silesia-Poznań area, characterized by a subtly different way of voicing and devoicing consonants between words. The Silesia region itself has a noticeably different dialect, characterized among other things by its nonstandard treatment of nasal and certain other vowels. The Góral dialect of the high south mountains is quite distinct both in vocabulary and, mainly, in its lack of differentiation between such consonants as cz and c, ż and z, sz and s.