Polish Pronunciation

Several Polish letters cannot be easily viewed on the WWW. They will be represented by the ascii characters: a, an a with a tail curling to the right; e, an e with a tail; c' a c with acute accent; l/ an l with a diagonal slash through it; n' an n with an acute accent; s' an s with an acute accent; z' a z with an acute accent; and z. a z with a single dot over it.

CONSONANTS
LETTER	PRONUNCIATION
B, F, K, L, M, P, S, Z	just as in English.
C	as the English 'ts' in cats.
CZ	as the English 'ch' in church.
DZ	as the English 'ds' in beds.
DZ.	as the English 'j' in jam.
G	as the English 'g' in girl.
H or CH	as the Scottish or German 'ch' in loch.
J	as the English 'y' in yet.
L/	as the English 'w' in win.
R	as the Scottish or German 'r': trilled by vibration of the tongue.
SZ	as the English 'sh' in shut.
N, T, D	as in English, but put your tongue against the front teeth and not against the teeth ridge
W	the English 'v' in van
Z. or RZ	as the English 's' in pleasure.

Softened Consonants

A common phenomenon in the Slavic languages is "softening" or "softened" pronunciation of consonants. This is made by pronounced a slight 'y' immediately following the letter.

Example: NIE is pronounced NyEH

This occurance happens in the following letters:
C     written     C' or CI
N     written     N' or NI (as in the Spanish ñ)
S     written     S' or SI
Z     written     Z' or ZI (can also occur in the pair dz = dz' or dzi)

It is important to note the voiced consonants become devoiced at the end of words.

Example: CHLEB is pronounced CHLEP

Voiced	Devoiced
B	P
D	T
G	K
W	F
Z, RZ	SZ

VOWELS
LETTER	PRONUNCIATION
A	as the English 'u' in cult.
E	as the English 'e' in ten.
I	as the English 'i' in fit.
O	as the English 'o' in cot.
U	as the English 'oo' in boot.

Nazalized Vowels

Polish has two vowels which are nazalized. In theory, nazalization should occur by pronouncing a short French 'n' after the vowel. Such as in the French 'bon'. However, one can easily get away with just pronouncing an regular 'n' after the vowel.

NAZALIZED VOWELS
LETTER	PRONUNCIATION
A	pronounced like the English 'on'.
E	before a consonant: pronounced like the 'en' in English ten.
	at the end of a word: pronounced like a normal Polish 'e'.

DIPTHONGS
LETTER	PRONUNCIATION
AJ	as the English 'i' in like.
EJ	as the English 'a' in take.

SRESS

The stress falls in Polish on the next to last syllable.

This page compiled by Timothy Kroll.