ABSTRACT
Over 38 million citizens reside in the Republic of Poland, with a vast majority of them – 95% – declaring Polish to be their native language. The remaining 5% articulate their familiarity with Polish, however, officially they constitute part of so-called national and ethnic minorities of the nation (Komorowska, 2013). Hence, to some extent, it may be stated that Poland is a uniform state in terms of ethnicity, with one of the lowest percentages of minorities in the EU (Romanowski, 2020). However, when looking at the historical context, the territory of the Republic of Poland has a long history of hosting a much higher percentage of national and ethnic minorities, reflecting its huge linguistic diversity (Moskal, 2004). Before the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, about 40% of the population consisted of national and ethnic minorities. In those times, the territories of Lithuania, Belarus, most of present-day Ukraine, and Poland were part of one state or a union of states (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1385–1795). Between World War I and World War II (1918–1939), after Poland regained independence as much as 33% of its citizens declared a different ethnicity. They inhabited over half of the country’s territory (Majewicz & Wicherkiewicz, 1998). According to Kersten (1989), the population of Poland at the time consisted of Ukrainians and Russians (15%), Jews (9.5%), Belarusians (3.5%), Germans (2%), and other minorities (3%). These numbers decreased dramatically to only 3% after World War II, resulting in Poland becoming a one-nation and monolingual state, due to border-shifting, migration, and the holocaust (Dąbrowska, 2014). In the Polish People’s Republic, the country that was created after World War II, the government adopted a policy against linguistic and ethnic minorities, which was typical of the whole Eastern bloc and the newly-created countries of Eastern Europe at the time (Romanowski, 2020). Currently, the largest minority groups in Poland are German, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, and the smallest ones are Slovak, Czech, Armenian, Tatar, and Karaim (Pisarek, 2011). As far as regional languages are concerned, it is worth reiterating that Kashubian spoken in the north of the country is celebrating its revival.
