Polish alphabet

The Polish alphabet. Grey indicates letters not used in native words.

The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography . It is based on the Latin alphabet, but includes certain letters with diacritics: the line or kreska, which is graphically similar to an acute accent (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź); the overdot or kropka (ż); the tail or ogonek (ą, ę); and the stroke (ł). The letters q, v and x, which are used only in foreign words, are frequently not considered part of the Polish alphabet,

The Polish alphabet, or variations of it, is also used for writing Kashubian, Silesian, and to a certain extent for the Sorbian languages.

Letters

When Q, V and X are excluded, there are 32 letters in the Polish alphabet: 9 vowels and 23 consonants.

The following table lists the letters of the alphabet, their Polish names (see also Names of letters below), the Polish phonemes which they usually represent, rough English (or other) equivalents to the sounds of those phonemes, and other possible pronunciations. For more information about the sounds, see Polish phonology.

Upper case	Lower case	Polish name	Usual value	Rough English (or other) equivalent	Other values
A	a	a	/a/	between cat and cut
Ą	ą	ą	/ɔ̃/	nasal o as French bon	/ɔn/, /ɔm/ (see Nasal vowels)
B	b	be	/b/	bed	/p/ when devoiced
C	c	ce	/t​͡s/	pits	For ch, ci, cz see Digraphs below
Ć	ć	cie	/t​͡ɕ/	cheap (alveolo-palatal)
D	d	de	/d/	dog	/t/ when devoiced. For dz etc. see Digraphs below
E	e	e	/ɛ/	bed
Ę	ę	ę	/ɛ̃/	nasal e	/ɛn/, /ɛm/ (see Nasal vowels)
F	f	ef	/f/	fat
G	g	gie	/ɡ/	go	/k/ when devoiced. For gi see Digraphs below
H	h	ha	/x/	Scots loch	For ch and (c)hi see Digraphs below
I	i	i	/i/	meet	/j/, or palatization (see Spelling rules)
J	j	jot	/j/	yes
K	k	ka	/k/	scant	/ɡ/ if voiced. For ki see Digraphs below
L	l	el	/l/	light
Ł	ł	eł	/w/	will
M	m	em	/m/	men
N	n	en	/n/	not	For ni see Digraphs below
Ń	ń	eń	/ɲ/	canyon (alveolo-palatal)
O	o	o	/ɔ/	British English long
Ó	ó	o (or u) z kreską	/u/	boot
P	p	pe	/p/	spot	/b/ if voiced
R	r	er	/r/	trilled r	For rz see Digraphs below
S	s	es	/s/	sea	For sz, si see Digraphs below
Ś	ś	eś	/ɕ/	sheep (alveolo-palatal)	/ʑ/ (cf. Ź) if voiced
T	t	te	/t/	start	/d/ if voiced
U	u	u	/u/	boot	Sometimes /w/ after vowels
W	w	wu	/v/	vow	/f/ when devoiced
Y	y	igrek	/ɨ/	between fit and put
Z	z	zet	/z/	zoo	/s/ when devoiced. For digraphs see below
Ź	ź	ziet	/ʑ/	vision, alveolo-palatal	/ɕ/ when devoiced. For dź see Digraphs below
Ż	ż	żet	/ʐ/	vision	/ʂ/ when devoiced. For dż see Digraphs below

Especially in handwriting, Ż ż is often written Ƶ ƶ (using a strikethrough instead of a dot). Similarly ł is often written as an l with something resembling a tilde above it.

The letters q, v, and x do not belong to the Polish alphabet, but are used in some foreign words and commercial names. In loanwords they are often replaced by kw, w, and ks, respectively (as in kwarc "quartz", weranda "veranda", ekstra "extra").

For digraphs, see the next section. For other rules about spelling and the corresponding pronunciations, see Spelling rules in the article on Polish orthography.

Digraphs

Polish orthography uses the following digraphs (combinations of two letters that normally represent one sound):

Digraph	Usual value	Rough English equivalent	Other values
ch	/x/	See H above
cz	/t​͡ʂ/	chat
dz	/d​͡z/	bids	/t​͡s/ when devoiced (cf. C above)
dź	/d​͡ʑ/	jeep	/t​͡ɕ/when devoiced (cf. Ć above)
dż	/d​͡ʐ/	jump	/t​͡ʂ/ when devoiced (cf. cz)
rz	/ʐ/	See Ż above	/ʂ/ when devoiced (cf. sz)
sz	/ʂ/	shock

There are also digraphs and trigraphs in which the letter i is used to denote that the preceding consonant is palatal or palatized: ci, dzi, gi, (c)hi, ki, ni, si, zi. For these, see Palatal and palatalized consonants in the article on Polish orthography.

Names of letters

The spoken Polish names of the letters are given in the table under Letters above. The additional letters Q, V and X are named ku, fau and iks.

The names of the letters are not normally written out in the way shown above, except as part of certain lexicalized abbreviations, such as Pekao (or PeKaO), the name of a bank, which represents the spoken form of the abbreviation P.K.O.

Some letters may be referred to in alternative ways, often consisting of just the sound of the letter. For example, Y may be called y rather than igrek.

When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters. For example, H may be referred to as samo h ("h alone") to distinguish it from CH (ce ha). The letter Ż may be called żet (or zet) z kropką ("Ż with a dot") to distinguish it from RZ (er zet). The letter U may be called u otwarte ("open u", a reference to its graphical form), to distinguish it from Ó, which is sometimes called u zamknięte ("closed u").

Alphabetical order

Polish alphabetical ordering uses the order of letters as in the table under Letters above. Q, V and X, if present, take their usual positions in the Latin alphabet (after P, U and W respectively).

Note that (unlike in languages such as French) Polish letters with diacritics are treated as fully independent letters in alphabetical ordering. For example, być comes after bycie. The diacritic letters also have their own sections in dictionaries (words beginning with ć are not usually listed under c).

Digraphs are not given any special treatment in alphabetical ordering. For example, ch is treated simply as c followed by h, and not as a single letter as in Czech.

Computer encoding

There are several different systems for encoding the Polish alphabet for computers. The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), although both ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) and ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is Windows-1250.

The Polish letters which are not present in the English alphabet have the following HTML codes and Unicode codepoints:

Upper case	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż
HTML entity	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż
Unicode	U+0104	U+0106	U+0118	U+0141	U+0143	U+00D3	U+015A	U+0179	U+017B
Result	Ą	Ć	Ę	Ł	Ń	Ó	Ś	Ź	Ż

Lower case	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó	ś	ź	ż
HTML entity	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó ó	ś	ź	ż
Unicode	U+0105	U+0107	U+0119	U+0142	U+0144	U+00F3	U+015B	U+017A	U+017C
Result	ą	ć	ę	ł	ń	ó	ś	ź	ż

For other encodings, see Polish code pages.

A common test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters is Zażółć gęślą jaźń (meaning "turn the ego yellow with a song" [?]).

External links

• Online editor for typing Polish characters