Laravel localization in Polish Polski

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, Polish commonly uses: pl_PL

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'pl',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('pl');

Plural rules: what Polish actually needs

CLDR defines 4 cardinal categories for Polish. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 3 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/pl/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

This language uses 3 plural forms. Laravel's built-in trans_choice only resolves two, so for grammatically correct output use an ICU MessageFormat package or handle the extra forms explicitly against the CLDR categories above.

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for Polish (pl locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('pl');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "sobota, 21 marca 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "sobota, 21 marca 2026 14:30"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "21.03.2026"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "3 miesiące temu"

What to watch out for in Polish

• Seven grammatical cases: noun forms change inside sentences, so avoid raw placeholder insertion.
• Complex plural rules (one/few/many/other): 2-4 and 5+ take different forms, and 12-14 behave differently again.
• Three grammatical genders with adjective and past-tense verb agreement; ty/Pan-Pani formal distinction.
• Decimal comma with space as thousands separator (1 234,56).

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in Polish by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add pl
php artisan lang:update