Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest known sentence written entirely in the Polish language is Day ut ia pobrusa a ti poziwai, which translates to let me grind and you take a rest. This phrase appears in the Book of Henryków and was recorded around 1280 by the monk Peter of the Henryków monastery.
The Polish state emerged under Mieszko I who united the Polans tribe and accepted baptism in 966. This event triggered the emergence of Polish as a distinct language and the adoption of the Latin alphabet allowed the language to be written down for the first time.
The Polish alphabet features 32 letters that include nine additions to the basic 26-letter set while removing x, q, and v from standard usage. These additions include letters with diacritics such as the ogonek on ę and ą and the kreska on ń, ś, ź, and ć.
Polish has absorbed vast numbers of words from Latin, Italian, French, German, Turkish, and Yiddish. Examples include pomidor from Italian, ekran from French, handel from German, szaszłyk from Turkish, and bachor from Yiddish.
The main regional dialects include Greater Polish, Lesser Polish, and Masovian which form the core of the standard language. Silesian and Kashubian remain subjects of debate with some linguists considering them distinct languages rather than dialects.
There are over 39.7 million native speakers of the Polish language in 2024 with significant diaspora communities in countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The largest concentrations of speakers in the United States are found in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey.