Do Poles prefer US American or UK English language?

That's standard international English.

There are textbooks available from over there, generally versions of British ones that have been simplified, however they don't sell well and the main international exams use standard English.

Thats because when Brits speak its sounds like they have marbles in their mouths:)

When I hear British English I switch to another channel.

Exactly. You can`t bear this embarassment when you realise what vulgar variety of English you speak in the US.

While you speak as if you had Novi`s balls in your mouth. Simple.

Depends. I like BBC newscaster's English. Perfect English in my book.
On the other hand, recently I have been watching Agent Carter. And good lord, she is supposed to speak with British accent, but she is talking so fast, blurring all the words together, that I had to turn on the English subtitles , because as far as I am concerned she may be as well speaking Japanese. So I treated it as an anime.

I've heard both, actually!
Seems the younger the Poles, the more attractive American English
is, whereas older Poles or Poles over 50, tend to lapse into the British
English they learned no doubt in school, or perhaps on vacation in the UK.

Not in Poland. Standard English is taught in schools and used by people of all ages.


It's the same. People just don't pick up Australian, America or Nigerian English unless they've lived in one of those places or have some particular connection to one of them.

Define "Standard English"....


Years ago during exams a student came in and I thought I heard something of an Australian accent (not too overt but around the edges). I asked and she had family there and had spent a non-trivial amount of time visiting them.

None of the Polish teachers (despite being very competent and extremely fluent) heard that at all. I wonder sometimes how apparent accents are for non-native speakers of English.

If you reach B-2 or so level in Spanish different accents sound completely different in very obvious ways (watching an Argentinian series (with lektor) I heard a few syllables spoken by a maid and 'said 'She's not local, she sounds Andean' and a few minutes later it's revealed she was from Peru). This surprised the Polish person I was watching with.... a great deal.
But time and time again Polish people whose English is as good as or better than my Spanish don't hear different accents (or can't place them as such).
I wonder why that is.... I have ideas but I'd like others' input.

A while back a Polish friend of mine who's been in the UK for 15 years and speaks good English was showing me a cooking video of a couple of Australian guys making a stir-fry dish. She thought they were Irish..........which I found staggering considering that at one time she used to work in a bar that was run by an Irish couple...........


I listened to her speaking and to me it's very obvious she's spent time in the US. She has a British accent but there's a strong American twang in there, but then her father is American so she may have picked that up from him before moving to the States.

As it is used in England, its home, and worldwide apart from a couple of places.


I once tested a youngish Polish guy. Maybe 25 years ago. There was something off about the pronunciation, a sort of Italian sound. It turned out he'd spent 2 years in England and spent the whole time working in an Italian restaurant Luton.


Poles aren't always that good at distinguishing specific accents in Polish. For me, Mazowsze, Podlasie, Poznań etc are obvious. Many Poles have told me no. There seems to be a lack of respect (surely for historical reasons) for both dialects and sociolects.

What couple of places? English is a pluricentric (or polycentric) language (like French, Spanish, German,Chinese... sort of Arabic) with more than one standard version and speakers of one standard do not necessarily accept others.

There's an emerging 'international English' but it's kind of impoverished (and dreadfully boring to listen to for native speakers) but it's a better single option than something mostly centered in one country.


I've noticed that.... I remember a friend being convinced that a person on tv was from a particular place just because he ended almost every sentence with ...nie? which is not regional at all...

I remember a meeting years ago and the question of why Czechs understand Polish (in general terms) better than Poles understand Czech...

One Czech person said "Because we're used to hearing Slovak" which was I think only part of the answer. Czechs have big differences between formal and informal forms and regional dialects are still a thing there. So Czechs grow up being more attuned to differences than do Poles who grow up hearing Standard Polish almost exclusively.

The largest places that use non-standard forms day to day and for official documents are the USA and Nigeria.


It's also the language of a specific ethnic group resident on a small island and with a rich history.

Spanish? The same, though Galician and Valencian confuse it.


And rarely like regional forms.

It's probably part of an 'estuarisation' of Polish (imagine every English person sounding like Sir Keir Starmer). Much to do with population movements post-war and a desire (Poles are after all very conformist) to conform.

Think of the first scene of Sami Swój or even those fragments of pre-war films they used to show on TV on Sundays.

Linguistic conformity seems to be part of the drive to become Polish post independence.

Not India? I've seen newspaper stories from there that are..... not easily comprehensible.

Speaking of Nigeria, what do you think of this?

bbc.com/pidgin

I've followed it off and on (mostly off for months and months at a time) but over time it seems much less.... Englishy with more phonetic spellings and Nigerian words like 'dey' (a copula).

Generally the posher Indians are comprehensible to people from England, although in the media they do often use words specific to their situation there. And have their own English words like "groupism".

The exams they take are all in standard English and they still often speak with the ghost of a pre-RP upper class accent.


That's fascinating and the first time I've seen it. It seems very simplified and of course that is consistent with being a pidgin or creole. It reads beautifully and there are certainly people in Europe, especially London, who speak that daily.

I've also heard Nigerians (freshers at a U.K. university) that I struggled to understand. Mind you, some of them were peng.

They use "wey" a lot and in an interesting way.


It somehow reminds me of this:

youtu.be/5wB0OkcCps8

youtu.be/hXWrgnavIkY

I don't have much experience with fellow Poles speaking English, and maybe I am judging all the stuff through my personal lens, but from what I can gather, although what is taught in Polish schools is British English (say, Received Pronunciation), most people after a while turn to the American variety (probably because of much greater exposure through various media)

Interesting to know, gumishu!

It's because everybody wants to be an American and nobody wants to be British.

Spoken like a true ignoramus!

Quoting:

At the start of FY 2024, there were about 34.7 million applications pending for green cards.

Name another country that has more applications, moron...

One can only envy that the USA is so popular.

No... students get no particular pronunciation guide in school (including no hints at intonation which is super important in native speech) and almost no Poles use a real RP non-rhotic pronunciation.... even those who want an RP pronunciation can't pull it off.

The vocabulary skews a little British but not strongly, queue instead of line or lift instead of the correct elevator but collocations don't... almost no Poles outside of the UK would say 'X is different to Y' or 'at the weak end' (for 'on/during the weekend').

Hardly any Poles (even advanced English specialists) get much training in things like discourse and pragmatics which often shows in painful ways.

I'd describe it more as 'neutral International' (or what I like call Euro-crap English) with vocabulary that skews a bit British and slang (or attempts at slang) that skew American.

Yes, however Standard English is a better description since the curriculum avoids speech patterns and lexis specific to the islands. It also avoids Americanisms like "gotten' however they creep into speech and sound old-fashioned.


Not so much so, however some words, e.g.schedule end up being pronounced sk rather than sh. I have not noticed much evidence of American speech patterns in PL unless it's someone with a specific connection to there or Canada.

"Gotten" is perfectly acceptable English.

In America only and maybe Canada. Nobody else says it, and it sounds centuries old.

It's lovely.

I'll mention that GAE makes a distinction (informally) that seems absent in the UK.

UK mostly seems to mostly use 'has got' for possession while in the US 'have' and 'have got' are both used but slightly differently.

'have' is simple possession while 'have got' implies some particular relevance.

I have a car. (yippeee yay me! I have a car!)

I've got a car. (we can take it to get to the concert, or I can go on my own to whatever event we were talking about).

I've asked a lot of GAE and British native speakers and almost all GAE speakers have agreed (though they might have to think it through for a moment) and no UK speakershave.

A weird Australian thing (apart from the use of 'confronting' to mean 'moving' or 'shocking' is the expansion of 'own'. Apparently there people say things like 'He owns 50,000 dollars in the bank' or even ''He owns a great deal of patience'. Is that usage found anywhere in the B-Isles?

And when/where id 'different to' appear? I hate that one... just sounds wrong

In fact, I know plenty of youngish Brits who typically say, "I've gotten tired of
our PM" etc...

I'd agree with that.


I'd like to know where those Brits are then because I've never heard a single British person use that word in the UK. It just wouldn't be used over here.