In 2019, the National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) established the “Promotion of the Polish Language” programme, which is one of the key initiatives supporting academic and scientific institutions in disseminating and popularising the study of the Polish language and Polish culture abroad. NAWA has just presented a publication that presents the successes of the beneficiaries of the four editions of this programme.

In his foreword, Dr Dawid Kostecki, Director of NAWA, stated that “a world without language would be a world without culture. Language is, after all, one of the foundations of modern civilisation. Among many languages, the most beautiful is the Polish language, our national asset”.

The number of users of the Polish language is estimated at more than 45 million people, of whom about 38 million live in Poland. Polish is also spoken by numerous groups of Poles or people with Polish roots living abroad, including in the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Iceland, as well as in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and Ukraine.

The NAWA director recalled that a growing number of people are learning Polish as a foreign language. The number of such people is estimated at nearly 10,000 worldwide, of whom approximately one third study Polish at universities and language schools in Poland.

Presenting the publication, Mariusz Czech, director of the NAWA Polish Language Programmes Office, wrote that the examples of projects included in it promote the Polish language, as well as Polish history and culture, in a non-standard, fresh, and revealing way. The Baltic legends in the form of a computer game, the legacy of the Jagiellons in Finland, a world encyclopaedia of Polish studies, and the correspondence between Herbert and Dedecius are just a few of the topics of the projects presented in the publication as examples of best practices in the Promotion of the Polish Language programme”, said Mariusz Czech.

Adrian Andrzejewski