Essential Polish phrases

Good day and goodbye. Said on entering and leaving a shop, a lift or a waiting room. Skipping it reads as rudeness, not reserve.

Sir / madam, and the grammatical subject of the sentence. Polish has no neutral 'you', so every sentence commits you to formal or informal.

A native Silesian and an incomer from elsewhere in Poland. Used affectionately between friends and pointedly otherwise. As a foreigner you are neither, which is oddly comfortable.

Your national identification number. Nothing digital in Poland works without it — tax, NFZ, e-government, most banking.

The government digital identity. Since 27 April 2026 you cannot file a residence application without one, and the fastest way to get it is your bank's app.

A red-brick miners' tenement built by the pit for its workers. Nikiszowiec and Giszowiec are whole estates of them, and living in one is a genuine housing option here.

The Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolia — 41 municipalities sharing one transport authority. People say 'I live in the Metropolia' rather than naming a city, and it is not a figure of speech.

The lump-sum tax on revenue that most Polish IT contractors elect — 12% for software development. The choice is annual and the deadline is unforgiving.

'Low-stack emission' — the household coal and wood stoves that make Silesian winter air the worst in the country. A word you will learn from the weather app in November.

The Silesian speech. Parliament voted twice to recognise it as a regional language and it was vetoed both times, most recently in February 2026 — so it is a political subject, not just a linguistic one.

The cage and the shaft. Mining vocabulary is ordinary conversational Polish here, because in most families somebody worked underground within living memory.

112 for any emergency from any phone, in Polish or English. 999 goes directly to an ambulance dispatcher.