A new study from the University of Maryland and Microsoft found that artificial intelligence interprets Polish commands better than any other language. English, surprisingly, finished only in sixth place. Researchers tested 26 languages across major AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google Gemini, Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek.
“Our results were unexpected,” the researchers wrote. “English did not dominate performance as assumed. When handling longer texts, it placed sixth, while Polish ranked first overall.”
AI Excels in a Language Humans Find Complex
Polish achieved an impressive 88% accuracy rate in task completion, marking it as the most effective language for AI interaction. The Polish Patent Office noted, “Polish turns out to be the clearest for AI commands. Humans may struggle with it, but AI handles it smoothly.”
Experts found it striking that AI mastered Polish despite having far less training data in that language compared with English or Chinese. In contrast, Chinese performed poorly, landing near the bottom of the rankings.
The Languages AI Understands Best
Polish led the rankings with 88% accuracy, followed closely by French at 87%, Italian at 86%, and Spanish at 85%. Russian came next with 84%, ahead of English at 83.9% and Ukrainian at 83.5%. Rounding out the top ten were Portuguese with 82%, German with 81%, and Dutch with 80%.
Researchers concluded that AI proficiency doesn’t depend on linguistic simplicity. In a surprising twist, machines now understand one of the world’s hardest languages better than most humans do.
