Ogonek in the context of "Old Norse"

Polish (endonym: język polski, [ˈjɛ̃zɨk ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɨzna] or simply polski, [ˈpɔlskʲi] ) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic subgroup, within the Indo-European language family, and is written in the Latin script. It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth-most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects. It maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals.

The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and nine written vowels, including two nasal vowels (ę, ą) denoted by a reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek. Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases. It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants. Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries).

The Polish alphabet (Polish: alfabet polski, abecadło) is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters (9) with diacritics: the stroke (acute accent or bar) – kreska: ⟨ć, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź⟩; the overdot – kropka: ⟨ż⟩; and the tail or ogonek – ⟨ą, ę⟩. The letters ⟨q⟩, ⟨v⟩, and ⟨x⟩, which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. Additionally, before the standardization of Polish spelling, ⟨qu⟩ was sometimes used in place of ⟨kw⟩, and ⟨x⟩ in place of ⟨ks⟩.

Modified variations of the Polish alphabet are used for writing Silesian and Kashubian, whereas the Sorbian languages use a mixture of Polish and Czech orthography.

In phonetics, nasalisation (or nasalization in American English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is [n].

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalisation is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic U+0303 ◌̃ COMBINING TILDE above the symbol for the sound to be nasalised: [ã] is the nasalised equivalent of [a], and [ṽ] is the nasalised equivalent of [v]. Although not IPA, a subscript diacritic [ą], called an ogonek, is sometimes seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would stack with the superscript tilde. For example, ⟨ą̄ ą́ ą̀ ą̂ ą̌⟩ are more legible than stacked ⟨ã̄ ã́ ã̀ ã̂ ã̌⟩. The subscript ogonek is also the preferred diacritic for nasalisation by Americanists.

The or Es with Descender (Ҫ ҫ; italics: Ҫ ҫ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. The name the is pronounced [θɛ], like the pronunciation of ⟨the⟩ in "theft". In Unicode, this letter is called "Es with descender". In Chuvash, it looks identical to the Latin letter C with cedilla (Ç ç Ç ç). Occasionally, it also has the hook diacritic curved rightward like an ogonek, as in the Scalable Vector Graphics image shown in the sidebar. In many fonts, the character hooks to the left.

The is used in the alphabets of the Bashkir, Chuvash, and Enets.

I with ogonek (majuscule: Į, minuscule: į) is a letter of the Latin alphabet formed by addition of the ogonek to the letter I. It is used in Lithuanian, Western Apache, Chipewyan, Mescalero-Chiricahua, Muscogee, Dadibi, Dalecarlian, Gwichʼin, Hän, Iñapari, Kaska, Navajo, Sierra Otomi, Sekani, Tagish, Tlingit, Tutchone, Winnebago, Assiniboine, Mandan, Osage, Tutelo, Catawba, and Ixtlán Zapotec.