Polish orthography
[1]: 6 The orthography is mostly phonetic, or rather phonemic—the written letters (or combinations of them) correspond in a consistent manner to the sounds, or rather the phonemes, of spoken Polish.
In loanwords q and v are often replaced by kw and w, respectively, and x by ks or gz (as in kwarc "quartz", weranda "veranda", ekstra "extra", egzosfera, "exosphere").
When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters.
The letter ó is a relic from hundreds of years ago when there was a length distinction in Polish similar to that in Czech, with á and é also being common at the time.
Subsequently, the length distinction disappeared and á and é were abolished, but ó came to be pronounced the same as u.
The diacritic letters also have their own sections in dictionaries (words beginning with ć are not usually listed under c).
Polish additionally uses the digraphs ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, and sz.
This is due to the neutralization that occurs at the end of words and in certain consonant clusters; for example, the ⟨b⟩ in klub ("club") is pronounced like a ⟨p⟩, and the ⟨rz⟩ in prze- sounds like ⟨sz⟩.
Less frequently, voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds; for example, the ⟨k⟩ in także ("also") is pronounced like a ⟨g⟩.
For example, the ⟨s⟩ in siwy ("grey-haired"), the ⟨si⟩ in siarka ("sulphur") and the ⟨ś⟩ in święty ("holy") all represent the sound /ɕ/.
The letter ⟨j⟩ normally appears in this position only after ⟨c⟩, ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩ if the palatalization effect described above has to be avoided (as in presja "pressure", Azja "Asia", lekcja "lesson", and the common suffixes -cja "-tion", -zja "-sion": stacja "station", wizja "vision").
(The spelling Angli, very frequently met with on the Internet, is simply an error in orthography, caused by this pronunciation.)
The letter ⟨u⟩ represents /w/ in the digraphs ⟨au⟩ and ⟨eu⟩ in loanwords, for example autor, Europa; but not in native words, like nauka, pronounced [naˈu.ka].
Polish does not capitalize the months and days of the week, nor adjectives and other forms derived from proper nouns (for example, angielski "English").
However, that alphabet was ill-equipped to represent certain Polish sounds, such as the palatal consonants and nasal vowels.
The other major Slavic languages which are now written in Latin-based alphabets (Slovak, Slovene, and Serbo-Croatian) use systems similar to the Czech.
Sorbian spelling is also closer to Czech, though it does include more Polish elements than the aforementioned languages.
A common test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters is the nonsensical "Zażółć gęślą jaźń".
