Polish is the national language of Poland, the largest and most populous country in central Europe. It is also the language of a sizeable Polish migration that settled in the countries of western Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Located in the heart of Europe, poised between Germany and Russia, Poland has often served, in the British historian Norman Davies' phrase, as "God's playground." It was the site of the inception of World War II, as well as of movements such as Solidarity that led to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. Poland has now entered the European Union but retains ties with countries to its east, thus serving as a conduit between east and west. It stands, in other words, at the center of the changes currently taking place in Europe.

Polish itself belongs to the Slavic family of languages and is fairly closely related to Czech and Slovak. It is also related to the eastern Slavic languages-Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian-and the southern Slavic languages, which include Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian. It has a number of interesting linguistic features; for example, it is the only Slavic language to have retained nasal vowels. But beyond that, it is the language of an especially rich world of literature, music, film, theater, and visual arts because over the centuries--even when Poland ceased for a time to exist as a geographical entity--it was the Polish language that preserved Poles' sense of identity as a distinct people and culture