The grammar of the Polish language is complex and characterized by a high degree of inflection, and has relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO).
Distinctive features include the different treatment of masculine personal nouns in the plural, and the complex grammar of numerals and quantifiers.
[1] Certain regular or common alternations apply across the Polish inflectional system, affecting the morphology of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech.
Some of these result from the restricted distribution of the vowels i and y, and from the voicing rules for consonants in clusters and at the end of words.
There are seven cases: nominative (mianownik), genitive (dopełniacz), dative (celownik), accusative (biernik), instrumental (narzędnik), locative (miejscownik), and vocative (wołacz).
There are three main genders (rodzaje): masculine (męski), feminine (żeński) and neuter (nijaki).
Masculine nouns are further divided into personal (męskoosobowy), animate (męskożywotny), and inanimate (męskorzeczowy) categories.
The following table presents examples of how a determiner ten/ta/to ("this") agrees with nouns of different genders in the nominative and the accusative, both singular and plural.
ten pies ten stół tego psa te stoły te kobiety te okna For verbs, the distinction is only important for past forms in the plural, as in the table below: pies biegał stół biegał stoły biegały kobiety biegały okna biegały The numeral dwa ("two"), on the other hand, behaves differently, merging masculine non-personal with neuter, but not with feminine: dwa stoły dwa okna Gender can usually be inferred from the ending of a noun.
Not all technological loanwords are animate either, e.g. inanimate modem, telefon ("telephone, cellphone"), and tranzystor ("transistor").
It is common for personal masculine nouns to change gender to inanimate to create semantic neologisms, for example edytor ("editor", pl.
For non-living objects that represent humans (e.g. in games), personal masculine nouns usually change gender to animate; for example, the word król ("king"), which is masculine-personal when referring to a monarch (pl.
ci królowie), becomes masculine-animate when referring to the playing card or the chess piece (pl.
The basic numerals are 0 zero, 1 jeden, 2 dwa, 3 trzy, 4 cztery, 5 pięć, 6 sześć, 7 siedem, 8 osiem, 9 dziewięć, 10 dziesięć, 11 jedenaście, 12 dwanaście, 13 trzynaście, 14 czternaście, 15 piętnaście, 16 szesnaście, 17 siedemnaście, 18 osiemnaście, 19 dziewiętnaście, 20 dwadzieścia, 30 trzydzieści, 40 czterdzieści, 50 pięćdziesiąt, 60 sześćdziesiąt, 70 siedemdziesiąt, 80 osiemdziesiąt, 90 dziewięćdziesiąt, 100 sto, 200 dwieście, 300 trzysta, 400 czterysta, 500 pięćset, 600 sześćset, 700 siedemset, 800 osiemset, 900 dziewięćset.
Compound numbers are constructed similarly as in English (for example, 91,234 is dziewięćdziesiąt jeden tysięcy dwieście trzydzieści cztery).
These are used with the following types of nouns: For the declension of collective numerals by case, see the morphology article section.
These include kilka ("several"), parę ("a few") and wiele ("much, many"), which behave like numbers above 5 in terms of the noun cases and verb forms taken.
There are also indefinite numerals kilkanaście, kilkadziesiąt, kilkaset (and similar forms with parę-), meaning "several-teen", several tens and several hundred.
Quantifiers that always take the genitive of nouns include dużo ("much, many"), mało ("few, little"), więcej ("more"), mniej ("less") (also najwięcej/najmniej "most/least"), trochę ("a bit"), pełno ("plenty, a lot").
For example, the present tense of jeść is jem, jesz, je; jemy, jecie, jedzą (meaning "(I) eat" etc.
– subject pronouns may be dropped), while the future tense of the corresponding perfective verb zjeść is zjem, zjesz etc.
The verb być has the irregular present tense jestem, jesteś, jest, jesteśmy, jesteście, są.
The personal past tense suffixes, which are reduced forms of the present tense of być, are clitics and can be detached from the verb to attach to another accented word earlier in the sentence, such as a question word (as in kogoście zobaczyli as an alternative to kogo zobaczyliście "whom did you see"), or (mostly in informal speech) an emphatic particle że (co żeście zrobili?
To make third-person imperative sentences (including with the polite second-person pronouns pan etc.)
is the appropriate part of the verb być ("to be"), e.g. jest... ("there is..."), są... ("there are..."), był(a/o)... ("there was..."), etc., with a noun phrase in the nominative.
The negative form is always singular (and neuter where applicable), takes the noun phrase in the genitive, and uses ma rather than jest in the present tense: nie ma kota ("there isn't a cat", also "the cat isn't there"), nie było kota etc.
There are various types of sentence in Polish that do not have subjects: The use of the cases of nouns is as follows: Like most Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, Polish classically uses no definite or indefinite articles, though certain words or grammatical features may substitute this, with a shift currently taking place in the language.
Recent academic research has shown a grammatical shift (not unlike the one which took place in other Indo-European languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian included), where the numeral jeden ("one") or pronoun jakiś ("of sorts"; different forms depending on the grammatical context) have begun to take characteristics of an indefinite article - an example here could be saying jeden kot ("one cat"), which by an increasing number of speakers can be interpreted in a way similar to saying "a cat" in English.
Adjectives generally precede the noun they modify, although in some fixed expressions and official names and phrases they can follow the noun (as in język polski "Polish language", rather than polski język; also dzień dobry "good day, hello", rather than dobry dzień).
Predicate adjectives agree with the relevant noun in gender and number, and are in the nominative case, unless the subject is unspecified (as in some infinitive phrases), in which case the adjective takes the (masculine/neuter) instrumental form (for example, być mądrym, "to be wise", although the nominative is used if the logical subject is specified)[citation needed].