The Polish alphabet. Gray indicates letters not used in native words.
The
Polish alphabet is the
script of the
Polish language. It is based on the
Latin alphabet but uses
diacritics such as the
kreska, which is graphically similar to an
acute accent (
ć,
ń,
ó,
ś,
ź), the
dot above (
ż), the
ogonek (
ą,
ę), and the
stroke (
ł). The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is
ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), although both
ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) and
ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is
Windows-1250.
Description
There are 32 letters in the Polish alphabet, including 9
vowels and 23
consonants.
There are also 7
digraphs (
ch,
cz,
dz,
dź,
dż,
rz,
sz).
The letters
q,
v and
x do not belong to the Polish alphabet, but are used in some foreign words and commercial names. In
loanwords they are often replaced by
kw,
w and
ks, respectively (as in
kwarc "quartz",
weranda "veranda",
ekstra "extra").
Some letters of the Polish alphabet not present in the
English alphabet can be shown using the following
HTML codes:
See also
