Lately, I’ve been wondering if the “ę” is usually pronunced at the end of words in Polish. The synthetic voices tend to pronounce it like “e” in this case, dropping the trailing nasalization.
The submissions by native speakers on various dictionary sites provide the contrary, where even at the end of “chcę”, “się”, or any word “*ę”, it has the “n-sounding” utterance at the end of the word.
The “ą” sounds like an English “o” with similar nasalization, which seems to always be pronounced as I would naively expect after about 2 weeks with the Polish alphabet.
Waxapax and Hyacinthe, you two have been quite helpful on this tiny Polish corner of our forum .
As far as I know, and from my experience with a former polish girlfriend, it’s a regional thing.
“High Polish” pronounces the ę at the end, and from what I read this is also how they speak for example in Warsaw.
What I’ve been hearing all the time from my girlfriend and their family is that they drop the nasalization. They are from Elbląg (near Gdańsk), i.e. the northern end of Poland…
Edit: and yes, ą is always nasal, even at the end. - Although I also heard it pronounced sometimes as “om”
I’m not quite sure how much of the linguistic diversity of Poland is owed to its tripartite partioning, but it seems that many neighboring groups have exerted influence on the language. Not only have the Prussians left their mark, Siliesians have a special place due to the Polish capital situated in Kraków throughout the Late Middle Ages.
I doubt many Poles, if any, think of themselves as historically “Prussian”, but how great of a role does geographic location play in dialectical differences? I’d imagine if the Prussians forced German to be the working language, that the nasalization could be lost with time. How big of a role does medieval/literary history play in the evolution of Polish? “High Polish” makes me wonder if it’s the literary standard of the language, and why that difference exists in the first place.
Prof. Bednarek explains it very clearly in her book [1]. She first introduces nasal vowels: ę, ǫ written as ą, ą as in awans (spoken out as avąs) – without a written letter, ų as in kunszt (spoken out as kųšt), ˛y as in czynsz etc. Then she explains how to pronounce ą (ǫ) and ę at the end of a word:
ą is always pronounced with full nasality: osobą osobǫ, sceną scenǫ etc. Pronouncing it as a diphtong
should be warned about.
ę at the end of a word is pronounced as lips e with a light nasality.
Diligent, full nasality is exaggerated and pretentious.
It’s incorrect to pronounce it as “om”
This is incorrect. One might drop nasality only speaking a few words together that have a lot of ęs, like cieszę się, że cię widzę.
@Papashrek420 languages borrow from other languages all the time, and geographical proximity makes it more likely. There’s no high Polish, Kashubian and Silesian are separate languages and I suppose they can pronounce om or em at the end of words however they want, neither of them is Polish. I never really heard of dialects in Poland although I met one guy last year that used to study Polish and he told me there are Polish dialects indeed. First time I see this dialect map, it’s interesting. Anyway, there’s no high Polish, there’s only one version of Polish deemed to be correct
References
[1]: Janina Danuta Bednarek Ćwiczenia wyrazistości mowy, sec. 2.9, pp. 43-44
That makes more sense to think of ą as nasal and to stray away from conceptualizing the vowel as a diphthong. I think for the ę, I will have to stray away from sounding too much like a villager from Minecraft.
Maybe for the Polish voice, should we request it to be changed? Not sure how the voice models are implemented in the backend, but if the voice isn’t pronouncing the ę how it should, that could affect learners’ listening comprehension.
You are currently our Northern star on this form, @waxapax! Will try not to sound pretentious thinking about ę, and have since thrown the misconception that there is a “High Polish” from the bellows of the nearest tower.
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osobǫ, sceną 