Dialects of Polish

Although traditional linguistic divisions continue to be cited, especially in Polish sources, the current linguistic consensus tends to consider Kashubian a separate language, or at least as a distinct lect that cannot be grouped at the same level as the four major modern Polish dialects.[6][7][8][9] Prior to World War II, Kashubian speakers were mainly surrounded by German speakers, with only a narrow border to the south with Polish speakers. Kashubian contains a number of features not found in other Polish dialects, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs. the six of standard Polish), evolution of the Proto-Slavic TorT group to TarT (a feature not found in any other Slavic language) 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 Kresy, the former eastern Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and currently absorbed into Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Both dialect groups have been in decline since World War II as a result of expulsions of millions of Poles from Kresy. Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), in Belarus (particularly in the northwest), and in northeast Poland continue to speak the Northern Kresy dialect, which sounds (in Polish described as zaciąganie z ruska) as if speaking with a Russian drawl, and is quite distinctive.

The majority of Poles expelled from Kresy were settled in newly annexed regions in northern and western Poland, and thereby their manner of speech evolved into so-called new mixed dialects. However, among the declining older generation there are still traces of Kresy dialect with its characteristic Ukrainian or Rusyn sounds, especially in the use of the East Slavic "L" where standard Polish uses "Ł" and of elongated vowels.

Many linguistic sources relating to the Slavic languages describe Silesian as a dialect of Polish.[1][2] However, many Silesians consider themselves a separate ethnicity and have been advocating the recognition of Silesian as a distinct language. According to the last official census in Poland in 2011, over 500 thousand people declared Silesian as their native language. Many sociolinguistic sources (e.g. Tomasz Kamusella assert that the determination between a language or a dialect is ultimately a matter of extralinguistic criteria, such as national attachment or the political attitudes of its users, and this changes over time.[10] See: Agnieszka Pianka, Alfred F. Majewicz, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz[11][12]) Language organizations such as SIL International and various linguistic resources such as Ethnologue, and Poland's Ministry of Administration and Digitization, recognize Silesian as a distinct language.[13][14][15] In 2007, Silesian was assigned its language code szl within the ISO 639-3 standard.