In British English one person who has their own category of pronouns is the Queen. She is addressed as Your Majesty and when she speaks she rarely uses I. Instead she uses ‘we’ even though she’s only talking about herself. It’s called the ‘Royal We’ and prompted Mark Twain to joke that only kings, presidents and people with tapeworm have the right to use ‘we’.
British and American English also no longer differentiates between the familiar and formal forms of the word ‘you’. Once we had thou and ye (you), but it’s been hundreds of years since they were last used in everyday speech. So when a native English speaker learns how to address others in Polish, it comes as quite a shock.
I wasn’t surprised that Polish has a polite form of ‘you’. I speak German and learned French at school, and both languages have such forms. What shocked me was that the Polish polite form is in the third person, so actually, when I say czy Pan/Pani tu siedzi?, what I am saying ‘is sir/madam sitting here?’
This made me feel a little strange. Besides the standard opening to a formal letter (Dear Sir or Madam), the words sir and madam are rarely used in English. Indeed, I hate it when anyone calls me sir because it implies a master/servant relationship. And when I realised that I was saying sir and madam in Polish, I felt like a beggar in a Dickens’ novel, humbly bowing before any lady or gentleman who tossed me a penny.
So it took me a while to get comfortable saying Pan and Pani, but, to be honest, that was the least of my challenges. Selecting the right way of addressing others in Polish is a little more complex than in English:
The equivalent table for English looks like this:
We have come up with plural forms like y’all, yous or you guys, but they’re not considered a part of English grammar yet.
In Polish it’s pretty easy to decide whether to use the singular or plural – it just involves counting up to two. It’s working out your place in the social hierarchy that’s a little harder. How does a Pole decide whether to use Ty or Pan/Pani? Well, it seems to involve a mathematical formula based on the following criteria:
If (B/A) x S x R > 1, then use Pan/Pani
- A = your age
- B = the other person’s age
- S = their social status (2 = professor, doctor etc, 1 = regular person, 0 = cham)
- R = how much you respect them (2 = very much, 1 = somewhat, 0 = they just crashed into your car)
I’ve been working on the above formula for a while, but it’s ‘work in progress’. I still need to include the gender of the other person, family relationship, and one’s goal in the relationship (e.g. do I want to marry this man’s daughter?).
Yet, despite the calculations involved, choosing the right form of address in a one-off situation is fairly straightforward. It’s when the variable of time is added, that things get more complicated. The question of when to switch from Pan/Pani to Ty is one that puzzles me:
- Who decides that the relationship is now close enough that we can switch from Pan/Pani to Ty?
- Is it always the older person that makes the offer to switch?
- Can a man suggest the switch to a woman or is that ungentlemanly conduct?
- At what age does a Pole move from being addressed by Ty to Pan/Pani? Is this a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood?
- How does alcohol impact this? If you get drunk with someone, do you automatically switch to Ty? If yes, after how many drinks?
- Are there obligations when you move from Pan/Pani to Ty? If you switch to Ty, does that mean you need to call on birthdays and name-days, or return missed phone calls quicker?
- Does switching to Ty mean that things you do for the other person become favours rather than transactions?
- Can you give constructive feedback to someone with whom you use Pan/Pani or only those with whom you use Ty?
- How do you keep track? Do Poles have a little notebook where they keep track of whom they need to address formally and with whom they’ve agreed to switch?
- What happens if you switch to Ty, but then don’t meet for next ten years, do you need to start from Pan/Pani again?
- Can you switch back to Pan/Pani if you fall out with the other person?
- Can you refuse to switch? A Pole once told me that her professor suggested she call her by name, but she declined. Nie chce mi to przejść przez gardło (I couldn’t get the word out of my throat) she said, meaning the professor’s name. Coming from an Anglo-Saxon country, I was stunned by this.
- What if you are a teacher and you are frozen for 30 years (like Jerzy Stuhr in Sex Mission) and when you wake up you are younger than your pupils. Should you use Pan/Pani?
I am also intrigued by the language that surrounds this. Jesteśmy na Ty (we are on you) sounds so odd when you translate it into English. Another one I like is when, at the start of a training session, the Polish trainer asks the group czy możemy mówić sobie po imieniu? (can we address each other by name?). At that moment, I usually think sarcastically how else are we going to address each other? By grunting and pointing?
If it wasn’t confusing enough, it seems there is even a hybrid form: Pan/Pani and the listener’s first name, e.g. Pani Małgosiu or Panie Piotrze. As far as I can tell, this form is used by elderly ladies with their friends and salespeople who want to create a false sense of closeness in order to try and sell you something.
I also wonder if this is changing? Does the internet, the influence of English and generational change mean that Ty is becoming more prevalent? It seems the internet and I have a Ty-relationship since most of its communications use this direct form. Perhaps this needs to be sorted – surely computers can handle my mathematical formula? And if they decided to re-brand YouTube under a Polish name, would it be called TyTube, WyTube, PaństwoTube… or perhaps the more Slavic PaństwoCiub?
But, after all these questions, I must say that there is one huge favour that Poles grant to foreigners:
We’re excluded from all this!
Poles don’t seem to care whether a foreigner uses Ty, Pani or whatever. I’ve never met a Pole that expected me to use it correctly or was offended when I didn’t. I wonder why this is. Is it because Poles appreciate that their language is extraordinarily difficult and give foreigners a free pass? Is it because Poles don’t have much experience of foreigners speaking their language and so have low expectations? Is it because all these norms and rules about respect only apply to native Polish speakers?
Whatever the reason, I am mightily relieved. I try to follow these linguistic and cultural norms as best I can, but, as you might have concluded from the number of questions in this post, I don’t have complete clarity around this language area yet.
Yours faithfully
Polisher
Polisher 
About alcohol – do you know about tradition called bruderszaft, or friendlier – brudzia? You tangle your arms together and drink a glass of vodka. Now you can kiss. “Roman jestem!”. “Basia”. Of course nowadays it’s done purely facetiously or even ironically, but still you can do it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
bruderszaft…sounds German. Does this work between nations too?
LikeLike
Yes, of course! 🙂 And the name indeed comes from german “Bruderschaft”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m Polish and I am equally confused about the switching rules 🙂 but some people are actually offended if you use the wrong one.
And anyway – it’s even worse than that. There are also official titles (profesor, prezes etc.) plus traditional ways of addressing people of certain professions: pani profesor/panie profesorze to a high school teacher, pani doktor/panie doktorze to a physician, regardless of their actual degree, pani magister/panie magistrze to a pharmacist, pani redaktor/panie redaktorze to a journalist (which I find quite ridiculous)…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, every time I think Polish is complicated, someone points out that ‘it’s even worse than that.’ Even pharmacists have their own title…wow!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, sorry about that 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think that it’s everywhere where for some people a language is not a mother tongue. Those people are always forbidden mistakes and all missuses.
In German they have really nice expression for “być na ty”. Dutzen. And actually I’ve found quite an interesting blog. I wonder who was inspired by whom 😀
https://blogs.transparent.com/german/the-german-you-duzen-und-siezen/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for the link Cela. I’m sure there’s a big market in explaining all this to English speakers. I actually speak German and lived there for two years, so I know all about dutzen and siezen…and I must admit that Polish takes it to a whole new level.
LikeLike
Yeah i agree. I just like the expression dutzen.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Is it because all these norms and rules about respect only apply to native Polish speakers?”
We are just so incredibly happy that you are even TRYING to speak polish 😉
LikeLiked by 2 people
At what age does a Pole move from being addressed by Ty to Pan/Pani? Is this a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood? – Almost. It means that for random people you look mature enough to put you into ‘Adult’ box. And it’s nice when you’re 15 and somebody talks to you in that way (not like your parents) 😛
The hybrid Pan/i+name is even more complicated. Pan/i+name (Pan Piotr, Pani Małgorzata) is more formal than Pan/i+informal_version_of_name (Pan Piotrek, Pani Małgosia). You need to know somebody rather well and still has some kind of respect to use second version. And you don’t want to cross the line with being too familiar.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So is there a sliding scale of formality from Pani Małgorzata to Pani Małgosiu to Pani Gosiu?
LikeLike
Yes, exactly.
LikeLike
“Who decides that the relationship is now close enough that we can switch from Pan/Pani to Ty?
Is it always the older person that makes the offer to switch?”
Yes, only the older/higher person can switch. Or rather: they can allow you to call them by you. 😉
“I also wonder if this is changing? Does the internet, the influence of English and generational change mean that Ty is becoming more prevalent?”
No. I heard that few years ago Empik’s (or another huge brand) workers had to speak “ty” to the customers. The thing stopped very quickly, because people got mad, and people got mad, because when stranger is saying “you”, it sounds rude and offensive. As you noticed, the “Pan/Pani” formula based on respect. Also it based on politeness, by saying “ty” we can show that we don’t respect other person, don’t care about manners etc.
The Internet is an extraordinary situation, when everyone are anonymus and you really don’t know ages, ranks etc.
Anyway, “pan” is rooted very deep in our heads: Polish has you-Sir hybryde, when verb is in 2nd person, but noun in 3rd. Like “Spadaj pan, pan jesteś świnia!” (Sir get lost, you Sir is a pig!”).
LikeLiked by 1 person
I gotta say, I understand why the person you mention didn’t want to call their professor by their name, I also have trouble being informal with older people or people who formally are more important than me like professors etc, even if they ask me to. It took me embarassingly long to start saying cześć instead of dzień dobry to people in my gym even though most of them are aged from 16 to 40 which places me about in the middle of the range and everyone else really doesn’t give a damn. It’s just so deeply rooted in my system to be extremely polite at all times. I only ever go by ty immediately either when I interact with a child or somebody who I know is about my age and/or a student like me. Another problem I have is that I look much younger than I actually am, especially when I don’t wear makeup which leads to some 40-50yo people automatically going by ty and even if I don’t say it out loud, I do feel like I’m being disregarded as a child. I don’t like when people in coffeeshops or stores are being informal in the same manner either. I don’t really care if that’s how they treat everyone who is young, we haven’t shaken hands, I don’t know your name and you don’t know mine, I don’t feel comfortable calling that person ty so why should they call me that way? It’s probably a salesman trick to create this false familiarity “hey, I’m young and you are young, let’s be friends and trust me to sell you the best thing we have” but it just really makes me so uncomfortable I only want to escape that shop as fast as possible.
What I noticed also is that people aged 30-35yo will be the ones who most often nervously laugh at you calling them pan/pani especially in some informal setting and ask you to go by ty, even if you are clearly younger than them (however, not a child), I think it makes them feel older than they are and not everyone is as crazy as me to want to be seen as such :’)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, we take it for granted, but English allows us to bypass all these awkward moments!
LikeLike
Pan/pani is about respect – but it might get offensive, but it’s another story. Yes, Poles are happy when someone is trying to speak polish, never mind the result 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
Abandoning the polite form allows to more freely express someones feelings, it creates a space for intimacy. On the other hand, this may also be understood as violating someone’s personal space.
There is a beautiful poem by A. Pushkin about this dichotomy between more and less polite form.
If you understand Russian, you can read it here: http://rvb.ru/pushkin/01text/01versus/0423_36/1828/0461.htm
Polish translation by Tuwim is also quite good: http://nora-domlilki.blogspot.com/2010/11/ty-i-pan-aleksander-puszkin.html.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Katarzyna! The poem (Tuwin’s version) does capture the dichotomy well – pusty pan and czuły ty!
LikeLike
I see it is the old post but I just started reading your blog. Maybe you’ve already figured out when to use a formal form Pan/Pani but if not I can clarify it., During day, to people you don’t know or are in formal relationship you use Pan/Pani/Panstwo. During night events e.g. club, house party, bar (unless it’s a fancy bar and you want to sound more fanccy 😉 ) you use informal way of speaking – “ty” form.
Usually, it is safer to start with Pan/Pani, a person you talk to will tell you right away if they prefer to be called by name e.g. “Mam na imie Kasia” or short “Kasia” or “Kasia wystarczy”. We use Pan/Pani and full name like Malgorzata (but not Malgosia or Gosia) to people we are a bit familiar with: someone that works in the same building and we know them, if we know the name of a person that works in the shop where we go every day. And I guess a celebrity of some sort we use Pan/Pani to show respect but we feel somehow familiar with them or want to be more familiar with them so we would add a name. When I was in school I would call cleaning ladies, security guard using the form Pan/Pani + first name because I wanted to be nice and be on friendly terms with them.
The last form Pani Malgosiu/ Pani Kasiu is used rather by older people. Although, I use it sometimes when I with my grandma and I talk to her friends.
In some places people prefer to use ty form but it should be clarify at the beginning. For example, in some companies the will tell you ” Tutaj zwracamy sie do siebie po imieniu”.
I think that’s all.
I wish you lots of energy to learn the language so different from English!
LikeLiked by 1 person
That helps. Thanks Jagoda… assuming I may use your first name 😉
LikeLike