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Polish Dialects
Polish has several dialects that correspond in the main to the old tribal divisions; the most significant of these (in terms of numbers of speakers) are Great Polish (spoken in the west), Little Polish (spoken in the south and southeast), Mazovian (Mazur) spoken throughout the centre and east of the country, and Silesian spoken in the southwest. Mazovian shares some features with the Kashubian language, whose remaining speakers (estimates vary from 100,000 to over 200,000) live in and around the city of Gdansk near the Baltic Sea, predominantly to the west of the city. There are also several, now mostly extinct, regional dialects of Polish, including the Warsaw dialect.Small numbers of people in Poland also speak Belarusian, Ukrainian, and German as well as several varieties of Romany.
The distribution of dialects is a remaining feature from the times when every Slavonic tribe was using its own language. Over centuries the languages of certain tribes have been developing and changing. Each dialect has several varieties which differ from the Polish language in vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation and morphology. To give some examples, in several areas of Poland as Silesian dialect nasal consonants are pronounced without nasal resonance while in others the sound may be nasalized (Mazovian dialect); inflection endings used in dialects have preserved some features of archaic Polish (Little Polis dialect); there are also tendencies in inflection simplifications and reducing the number of endings. Other dialectal special features are local words connected with farming which are no longer or have never been used in standard Polish.
An interesting feature occurred as a consequence of the mass migration process after 1945. Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union moved to the western and northern part of Poland bringing with them a dialect characteristic for the former eastern provinces. Furthermore, due to the policy of the socialist government that aimed in suppressing the development of local communities, thousands of people were forced to move within the country. The process of mixing of various communities resulted in an emergence of new, mixed dialects and lead to more homogeneity in standard Polish. Contemporary standard Polish, based mainly on the Warsaw variant of language, is spoken or at least understood in the whole country.