Polish Letters & Accents

The Polish alphabet has 32 letters: a ą b c ć d e ę f g h i j k l ł m n ń o ó p r s ś t u w y z ź ż. Compared with English it adds nine letters with marks and leaves out three: q, v and x are not part of the Polish alphabet, though they occur in foreign spellings, names and abbreviations such as quiz, Xawery and VAT; Polish-adapted spellings may use kw, w and ks for some loans.

Every marked letter is a letter in its own right, not a plain letter with decoration. In a dictionary ą follows a, ł follows l, and z, ź and ż are three separate sections in that order. Leaving the mark off changes the word: sąd is a court and sad an orchard, kąt an angle and kat an executioner.

Polish also writes several sounds with pairs of letters, which count as two letters in the alphabet: ch, cz, sz, rz, dz, dź and dż. Put together they give the famous consonant clusters of Szczecin, chrząszcz (beetle) and Brzęczyszczykiewicz. A handy test sentence for fonts and keyboards is Zażółć gęślą jaźń, three words that contain all nine special letters.

Polish accent marks: ogonek, kreska, kropka and the ł stroke

The ogonek (little tail) under ą and ę makes a nasal vowel, close to the French on and in: mąż (husband), ręka (hand). Before b and p the nasal turns into m, so dąb (oak) sounds like domp, and before t, d, k and g into n or ng: kąt, ręka. At the end of a word ę is usually said as a plain e: idę (I am going) sounds like ide. No Polish word begins with ą or ę, so their capitals turn up only in text written in capitals.

The kreska (little line, the acute accent) on ć ń ś ź marks a soft consonant, made with the middle of the tongue against the palate: ć and ś are softer cousins of ch and sh, ź the soft voiced partner of ś, and ń the ny of canyon. Before a vowel Polish writes the same softness with an i instead of the mark: ciocia (aunt), się, zima (winter), nie (no), but koń (horse), jesień (autumn), ćma (moth). The kreska is not a stress mark: Polish almost always stresses the next-to-last syllable.

ó is the exception. It sounds exactly like u, and the spelling only records history: the vowel used to be a long o, and it often turns back into o in other forms of the word: stół, stołu (table); Kraków, Krakowa. Spelling ó and u correctly is a classic Polish school test.

The kropka (dot) on ż gives the s of measure. The pair rz sounds the same, so może (maybe) and morze (sea) are said alike and told apart only in writing. ł, an l with a stroke, was once a dark l; today it sounds like English w, which is why Łódź is said roughly woodge and Wałęsa va-WEN-sa.

Polish quotation marks and punctuation: „ ” « » –

Polish opens a quotation low and closes it high with the same curly shape: „Dzień dobry” – powiedziała. The closing mark is ”, the one English uses to close a quote, not the “ used in German and Czech. A quotation inside a quotation takes chevrons: „Powiedział «tak» i wyszedł”.

Dialogue in books and subtitles is set with a dash rather than quotation marks: – Gdzie jesteś? – zapytała. Publishers use either the en dash – or the longer em dash —; the spaced en dash can join place names, as in Warszawa – Kraków, while numeric ranges normally use no spaces around it.

Numbers follow European custom: a decimal comma (3,14), a space between thousands (1 000 000) and dates written day first, 21.10.2026 or 21 października 2026. Prices take zł after the number, 25 zł or 25,99 zł; the złoty is divided into 100 groszy (gr) and its code is PLN. The złoty has no single Unicode sign: zł is written with the letters z and ł.

How to type Polish letters on a keyboard

Polish (Programmers) layout on Windows: this is the layout most commonly used in Poland. It is the ordinary US QWERTY keyboard, and the right Alt key (AltGr) plus a letter gives the Polish one: AltGr+A ą, AltGr+C ć, AltGr+E ę, AltGr+L ł, AltGr+N ń, AltGr+O ó, AltGr+S ś, AltGr+Z ż and AltGr+X ź (x, because z is already taken by ż). Add Shift for capitals. Add it under Settings → Time & language → Language & region; avoid the older Polish (214) typist layout, which moves Y and Z.

Mac: add the Polish input source in System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources; it keeps the US letters and gives the Polish ones with Option plus the same keys (Option+A ą, Option+L ł, Option+Z ż, Option+X ź and so on). On the US layout without changing anything, Option+E then o gives ó, but there is no built-in shortcut for the others.

Windows without the Polish layout: only ó and Ó have Alt codes on Western Windows (Alt+0243 and Alt+0211 on the number pad). For the rest, type the hex code in Word and press Alt+X: ą 0105, ć 0107, ę 0119, ł 0142, ń 0144, ś 015B, ź 017A, ż 017C; capitals Ą 0104, Ć 0106, Ę 0118, Ł 0141, Ń 0143, Ś 015A, Ź 0179, Ż 017B.

Phones: press and hold a, c, e, l, n, o, s or z on the iPhone or Android keyboard and slide to the Polish letter; adding the Polish keyboard brings them to the front and turns on Polish autocorrect. HTML and LaTeX: the named entities are ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż (capitalise the first letter for capitals), and LaTeX writes \k{a}, \l, \'s and \.z.

Where Polish is spoken, and the languages close to it

Polish has about 41 million speakers by CLDR estimates, some 37 million of them in Poland, where it is the only official language. Emigration has spread it widely: Polish is the most common main language after English in England and Wales, and there are large Polish-speaking communities in Germany, Ireland, the United States (Chicago above all) and Canada, while Poles of the Vilnius region in Lithuania and of western Ukraine have spoken it for centuries.

Polish is a West Slavic language, closest to Czech and Slovak, which use háčeks (č š ž) where Polish uses cz, sz and ż; its ą and ę keep the nasal vowels of old Slavic, which almost every other Slavic language has lost. Silesian and Kashubian, spoken in southern and northern Poland, have their own alphabets built on the Polish one. Lithuanian also uses the ogonek, on its ą ę į ų, and Ukrainian, an East Slavic neighbour written in Cyrillic, shares much of its vocabulary.