page_title: Poles
section_title: Language
hierarchical_section_title: Poles / Culture / Language
caption_attribution_description: English: Book of Henryków Slavic phrase
context_page_description: The Poles, commonly referred to as the Polish people, are a Central European nation native to Poland who share a common history, culture, and are speakers of the Polish language.
  The population of self-declared Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of an overall population of 38,538,000, of whom 36,522,000 declared Polish alone. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora exists throughout Europe, the Americas, and in Australasia. Today, the largest urban concentrations of Poles are within the Warsaw and Silesian metropolitan areas.
  The ethnic Polish people are considered to be the descendants of ancient West Slavic Lechites and other tribes that inhabited the Polish territories in late antiquity. Poland's recorded history dates back over a thousand years to c. 930–960 AD, when the Western Polans – an influential tribe in the Greater Poland region – united various Lechitic clans under what became the Piast dynasty, thus creating the first Polish state. The subsequent Christianization of Poland by the Catholic Church, in 966 CE, marked Poland's advent to the community of Western Christendom.
context_section_description: The Polish language (Polish: język polski) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group and the official language of Poland. Its written form uses the Polish alphabet, which is the Latin alphabet with the addition of a few diacritic marks.
  Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. Ethnic Poles constitute large minorities in Germany, northern Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Hungary, northeast Lithuania and western Belarus and Ukraine. Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results) and is found elsewhere in northeastern and western Lithuania. In Ukraine it is most common in the western Lviv and Volyn oblast (provinces), while in western Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border.
  The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the border changes and population transfers that followed World War II. Poles resettled in the "Recovered Territories" in the west and north. Some Poles remained in the previously Polish-ruled territories in the east that were annexed by the USSR, resulting in the present-day Polish-speaking minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, although many Poles were expelled or emigrated from those areas to areas within Poland's new borders. Meanwhile, the flight and expulsion of Germans, as well as the expulsion of Ukrainians and resettlement of Ukrainians within Poland, contributed to the country's linguistic homogeneity.
  Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner throughout most of Poland, though numerous languages and dialects coexist alongside the standard Polish language. The most common dialects in Poland are Silesian, spoken in Upper Silesia, and Kashubian, widely spoken in the north.
caption: Book of Henryków.  Highlighted in red is the earliest known sentence written in the Old Polish language
exif: {}