A new international study revealed that artificial intelligence follows instructions most accurately in Polish, not English. Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Maryland compared how 26 languages influenced AI performance and found Polish far ahead while English landed in sixth place.
The research team tested major models — including OpenAI, Google Gemini, Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek — using identical prompts translated into multiple languages. The results surprised even the experts who expected English to dominate.
“Our data produced unexpected outcomes,” the authors explained. “English ranked sixth in long-text responses, while Polish outperformed every other language tested.”
Machines Master a Language Humans Find Hard
Polish reached an impressive 88% accuracy rate, making it the most reliable language for interacting with AI. The Polish Patent Office celebrated the finding online, noting, “Polish turns out to be the clearest for artificial intelligence. People may find it tough, but machines don’t.”
Researchers emphasized that AI’s strong grasp of Polish is especially striking since far less Polish text exists in training datasets compared to English or Chinese. Still, the systems responded with high precision.
Meanwhile, Chinese scored near the bottom, ranking fourth from last out of all 26 tested languages.
How the Languages Ranked in AI Precision
The top ten languages that AI understood best were:
- Polish — 88%
- French — 87%
- Italian — 86%
- Spanish — 85%
- Russian — 84%
- English — 83.9%
- Ukrainian — 83.5%
- Portuguese — 82%
- German — 81%
- Dutch — 80%
Researchers concluded that linguistic complexity does not dictate AI comprehension. Despite its difficulty for people, Polish now stands as the language AI understands most clearly.
