UVA is a national leader in ... Polish?

“In Chicago, and in places like Ohio, New York, even Connecticut, you have a lot of heritage speakers, so it would make sense in those places,” said Dariusz Tolczyk, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UVA. “Polish communities like that don’t exist in Virginia.”

Word-of-mouth recommendations may be why a record 18 students are in Stepanic’s introductory class. (Photo by Kelly West, University Communications)

Enrollment has been growing, according to UVA professors who teach Polish. 

“When I first started to teach first-year Polish, I had three students one semester. Then it was 10,” Stanley Stepanic, an assistant professor of Polish, said. Now, he has 18 students in his introductory class, while Tolczyk teaches 13 in his secondary class.

“A lot of them are continuing, just for love of the language, just for fun,” Stepanic said.

The reason, students said, is the professors. Word-of-mouth recommendations have helped too.

“I had a friend take Polish first year, and she told me she loved the professors. She said they’re easygoing and you don’t have to know any Polish going into it,” third-year student Riley Wolfe-Rach said. “Learning a foreign language has always been intimidating for me, but hearing that, I thought, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’” 

When Tolczyk was looking for academic work, the accepted wisdom in his field was that the jobs for people with Slavic studies degrees were mostly in teaching Russian language and literature. 

“So, when my interview panel at UVA’s Slavic Department asked me if I would be interested in developing and teaching a Polish-language course, I knew I was at the right place,” Tolczyk said.

But interest in the Polish language and Polish culture more broadly is thriving at UVA. A course Tolczyk offers on Polish history reached its capacity and had a waitlist last semester.

Dariusz Tolcyzk teaches second year Polish at UVA, where he helped start the Polish language program. (Contributed photo)

Spanish, French and American Sign Language top the list for the most popular world language programs at American universities, according to the Modern Languages Association. All three are more commonly used at home than Polish. 

A class requirement is that everyone reads in Polish, out loud. (Photos by Kelly West, University Communications)

And while learning any language is difficult, Polish poses additional challenges. Its clusters of consonants are not intuitive for many native English speakers. Polish has seven different grammatical cases, meaning there are seven different ways to end a noun. Languages like French and Spanish have just two genders for nouns and adjectives, whereas Polish has three. Plus, many people in the United States have had less exposure to Polish. Compare about 600,000 Polish speakers in the country to roughly 45 million Spanish speakers.

That has not deterred the 18 students in Stepanic’s class, most of whom studied a different language in high school. Wolfe-Rach, who is majoring in public policy, took Spanish at her high school in Columbus, Georgia, and felt she had a good grasp on the basics.

“I wanted to try something else and diversify my repertoire,” she said. 

Grace Singh, a first-year student from Northern Virginia, decided a new language was the right way to start her college career.

“I had a little bit of background in Polish, because my mom is Polish. I can speak a bit, but my reading and writing need a lot of work, so I chose to improve that here,” Singh said.

She’s found a welcoming environment.

“We do a lot of speaking, which can be intimidating, but professor Stepanic makes it so positive,” she said.