Polish Diaspora - many of these 20 million actually speak Polish?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_diaspora

My question is: How much/many of these 20 million actually speak Polish?

u are going to find yourself in the 'Polish passport-never been to Poland' argument.

impossible to know the answer to your question.

i'd say old folk: many.
young folk: not so many. (unless actually born in Poland)

from our Serbian experiences i can tell you few things. First of all, it is very important that Polish diaspora isn't selfish. This means that Polish diaspora have all obligations to support Slavic Poland and not some americanized, germanized, canadized or australized Poland. Then, investments. Polish diaspora needs to invest in Poland and prepare conditions for its own retreat into new stabilized and stronger Poland, when so called west collapse due to its own greed.

I can say that many Poles in Canada can speak Polish.
There is 900,000-1,000,000 Poles here.


So 27 percent of Poles can speak Polish here.
I don't know if they count is as the first or second language though.

Additionally,

Depends - for instance, in Europe, there's two distinct "waves" - the first wave, post WW2 won't have passed the language on, but the second wave is much more recent (2004-now) and, of course, they'll all speak Polish.

Also worth pointing out that in Europe, people tend to assimilate quicker - you'll often find that the 2nd generation is already considered to be part of the host nation.

AND then there's the whole issue of whether they're actually Polish - having a Polish great-grandmother will not qualify you in the majority of peoples' eyes.

I am unsure of the exact number of Poles in Britain (~1,000,000 maybe?).
Many of these I assume left from Poland not to long ago. Surely Percentage wise Britain has more Polish speakers than US?

If one were to include people living around the world who have just 1/8 or 1/4 Polish ancestry, the Polish diaspora would be about 30 million people or more in the world.

Could be as high as 2 million, no-one knows the exact number. Likely to be over a million, though.


Yup, definitely.


But then you'd have to start counting whether or not they are actually Polish, or whether they were "polluted" with Czech/German/Ukrainian/Lemko/etc blood along the way.

No only petty fools and racists feel that they "have" to perform this "counting". A person with Polish and any other ancestry is still Polish and people who are Czech or Lemko etc. without any Polish ancestry do not just assume Polish ancestry on a whim. This attempt to call into question the Polishness of the Polish diaspora is the resort of jealous fools that are upset that Polonia is so vast and so beloved.

Estimates are usually over a million. According to census data the population prior to the rush after EU entry was 200,000.

Its not really that clear cut though. Ive met old Polish men who married English girls in the 40s and who now hardly remember any Polish themselves. But,on the other hand I did surprise the heck out of one of my old high school teachers by chatting in (limited ;) ) Polish with him a couple of years ago, he was second generation, his dad came during the war and passed the lingo down,as did my teacher to his kids.....


purely % wise thats probably the case, but,has been for a while. Its an old joke that my towns Yellow Pages had huge M, O and Z sections ( The Mc'scotties,the O paddies and all the Z...ski's :) )

Dessi, thats the way things work in your country with its long held obsession with making damn sure people knew their place ,people are not simply allowed to be American,they have to be "something-American" where as here,until only a few years ago,once you came here and decided to live here you were British,no matter how funny your accent or unpronounceable your last name :) No one is forced to forget where Granddad may have come from just because people dont feel the need to call themselves "something -British" :)

True for the majority of Americans but not for those descended from the original British colonists. They are the ones who will call themselves plain "American" and they are also, in part, the one's who made all the subsequent waves of immigrants into hyphenated Americans, because they reserved the title of true Americans for themselves and they excluded non-WASPs from the circles of power in the USA until relatively recently. An example of their prejudice that pertains to this thread's topic can be seen in a term of derision that they used for male Slavic immigrants, of which the greatest number were Polish, and this term is "Bohunk" often preceded by the adjective "oily". There cannot be a more tidy Germanized group in all of Slavija than the Bohemians, but here in America they, and other Slavic males, were seen by the WASPs as chaotic and dangerously sexually potent.

Everyone has the right to point out they are Polish if say their grandpa was Polish (whether or not they speak Polish).
But when it comes to reality different people have different exceptions of who is a Pole. I don't think its just fools and racists.

Of course this is true. The term "Pole" is not identical with the term "Polonian", but it is exclusively fools and racists who will claim that people are not Polish because they may also be some other Eastern European ethnicity as well as Polish.

Hahahaha. Des, you show precious little understanding of European history if you think that just because someone's deranged great-grandmother said she was "Polish", it doesn't make them so. The amount of mixing done in previous centuries throughout Europe was immense - it's impossible to say for certain where someone actually came from.


Beloved by who? The majority of Poles are ashamed of the behaviour of the Polonia.


Your imagination is rather amusing.

Dopeyandomine, you are an idiot for thinking immigrants to the USA, or elsewhere, would lie about being Polish when they were really some other ethnicity. You are the deranged person here not anyone's great-grandmother.

You do realise that "ethnicity" as a concept is pretty new in Europe as a whole? People tend to relate more to their country than their specific ethnic group here. But then again - you've never been here - what would you know?

Incidentally, given the large amount of mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages, how can you be certain that someone is of "Polish" heritage?

He thinks EPCOT world showcase and small world at Disney counts.

good point. there is no sense in lying about your background
an awful lot of Americans seem to claim being Irish but I think that is often in the case of being complete mutts

They may not have been lying, they may simply have been totally unaware. From all the research I've done, the line between "Polish" and "other" in Eastern Poland was incredibly blurred - Ukrainians and Belorussians would have identified as being Polish, partially because they were Polish citizens (albeit reluctantly).

Look at the names - many "Polish" people had clearly non-Polish names.

This is probably true, but it results from the fact that many Americans have been here for so many generations that they no longer know their ancestors' European origins and since being Irish has been, for the last several decades at least, celebrated here in America, many of these folks when asked will claim Irish ancestry. Demographers say that despite the large amount of Irish immigration to the USA there is no way that a full 10% of the USA is really of exclusively Irish origin.

nice people in general, the Americans

very friendly

In most parts it COUNTY (region)rather than country......:)

would you care to expound upon that statement?
I am intrigued...titillated even...

which names?

Even if this did happen in some cases it is mostly irrelevant because it ignores the fact that the bulk of Polish immigration to the USA occurred in the latter part of the 19th century and in the first two decades of the 20th before any Ukrainians or Belarussians had Polish citizenship in the Second Republic. The people that claimed they were Polish did so because they were Polish. They spoke Polish and they were Roman Catholics. Ukrainians and Belarussians were Orthodox and if they spoke Polish it was not their first language. Petending these people would claim to be Polish because they were "confused" is ridiculous.

perhaps they thought they might receive better treatment in the States if they 'marketed' themselves as being Polish

in the same way a lot of Americans will really play up their Irish heritage when visiting the old country

just a thought...

Or even that people knew something about Poland and the Polish but knew nothing about Lemk, Boyk, Kaszub, Galician, Slazak etc.

Of course It is. I don't think even Delphi is stupid enough to really believe it.

No you wouldn't have to do that. Only somebody who has a racist mindset like yourself would feel the need to do that.

Its interesting that somebody like yourself, who is NOT of Polish ancestry, regards nationalities like Czech, German, Ukraine, Lemko, etc as "polluting" material.