Dialects of Polish

Modern sources on the Slavic languages normally describe the Polish language as consisting of four major dialect groups, each primarily associated with a certain geographical region, and often further subdivided into subdialectal groups (called gwara in Polish):

The regional differences correspond mainly to old ethnic or tribal divisions from around a thousand years ago. As a result of expulsions and other displacements of Poles during and after World War II, as well as language policy in the People's Republic of Poland, the Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century.

Polish linguistic tradition includes three more dialect groups, for a total of seven:

This traditional division is still cited, especially in Polish sources. Current linguistic consensus, however, tends to consider Kashubian to be a separate language, or at least as a Slavic variety that cannot be grouped at the same level as the four major modern Polish dialects. Prior to World War II, Kashubian speakers were surrounded on both sides by German speakers, with only a narrow border to the south with Polish speakers. Kashubian contains a number of features not found in Polish dialects, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs. the five of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages.

The two Kresy dialects are spoken in the Kresy, the former eastern Polish territory annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and currently forming part of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Both dialect groups have been in decline since World War II as a result of Soviet expulsions of millions of Poles from the Kresy. Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), in Belarus (particularly the northwest), and in the northeast of Poland continue to speak a Northern Kresy dialect, which sounds "slushed" (in Polish described as zaciąganie z ruska, 'speaking with a Russian drawl'), and is easily distinguishable.

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