How similar is Serbian to Polish? In today’s language challenge, we will compare some of the similarities between these two Slavic languages, with Eliza, a Polish speaker from Poland, and Boris, a Serbian speaker from Serbia, challenging each other with a list of words and sentences. Polish is classified as a West Slavic Lechitic language, while Serbian is South Slavic along with some of the other languages spoken in the Balkans.
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Serbian (српски / srpski) is the official language of Serbia and one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is also spoken by the majority of people in Montenegro. Serbian is also recognized as a minority language in Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. After Russia, Ukraine and Poland are the second and third largest Slavic countries, and hence have the highest number of Slavic speakers, after Russian speakers. The Polish language (język polski, polszczyzna) is a West Slavic language, is the native language of the Poles and is spoken primarily in Poland where it has official status, along with the European Union. The Polish alphabet contains 9 additions to the letters of the basic Latin script (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż). Polish is closely related to Kashubian, Silesian, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak. Historically, Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century which largely triggered the establishment of the Polish state. In addition to Poland, the Polish language is native to Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, central-western Lithuania, bordering regions of western Ukraine and western Belarus, Romania, Moldova. It is recognized as a minority language in Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Slavic languages in general share a lot in common. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, descending from earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language. There are over 20 different Slavic languages, divided into 3 major subgroups, with Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian belonging to the East group, Polish, Czech and Slovak to the West group, and Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian to the South group.