Can you BE Polish without SPEAKING Polish in the US?

Well good then cousin Notty, as I will always be Polish no matter what others may think.
You think what you want to and I will think what I want to.
Długo żyć w Polsce

If you are convinced that you're Polish and if you familiar with Polish culture and history. Could be difficulty without working knowledge of the Polish language but not impossible.


Ethnicity is an entirely different matter MR Anthropologist. lol!
A Polish nation had been created by the Polish culture but include different ethnicities. Nobles or better still szlachta {Read - shlahta}( as this word better convey meaning than the English word nobles which implies exclusivity and sometimes aristocracy) adhered to the one dominant Catholic-Polish culture while being ethically diverse, including Ruthenianians all kind and shapes, Russian (better still Muscovites), Germans, Poles, Jews, Scots, French, Armenians, Tatars and so on....mixed with freedom.

Take for example Belarusian and Ukrainian they have less history, culture and factual claims to their own nationhood than nations like, Burgundy, Lotharingia, Normandy or Aquitania. It wasn't written in the stars that those nations each one with more factual claim to nationhood than 1000 states like U or B has to be French. Bah 200 years ago only minority of the populace in today France actually spoke French.

Nationalism and freedoms for peasants changed masses into French or what not.
Poland didn't exist in the whole 19th century.

To the point - modern Polish nationalism went to catholic peasants those who spoken local version of the Polish lingo and taught them to be Polish. Hence your 'ethnical' Poles.

To be a Pole is much more than that.
Europeans are indigenous European people with many tribes that mixed and enweaved for millennia. Funny that Germans being genetically the most mixed modern nation has that myth about one tribe.

Same with Italy, their unification is based on a pure cruel conquest of the south by the north (Piedmont) that almost wiped out their distinctive although dormant national identity and left them with mafia.

IMHO i think that should be Niech żyje Polska! Not many people know that O'Bama was part Polish. His grandfather had eaten a Polish missionary for breakfast!

...Polonius, save what's left of your dignity and delete that joke. It's not funny.

I stand corrected as I am not a native Pole.
Your joke however was hilarious.

That leftist slimeball displayed no dignity when trying to undermine normal marriage with his preveretd ersatz and promoting "Happy Holidays" contrary to what most Americans believe. Johnny Reb liked the joke BTW. Anyway, how does one delete a post? You know I'm a confirmed anti-gadgetarian.

Well I've always considered myself Canadian first. But I do acknowledge that I have Kashubian-polish descent, along with my Finnish descent so im a half breed. : /

I grew up with Beet Root Borshct, Cabbage Rolls, and of course Perogies. My families history has been passed down to me which is uniquely Polish in origin and I've been told by all Slavic people that I look 100% Slavic as opposed to looking Nordic.

I have roots going back to Kashubia Ontario and of course Poland and when I spent 2 months in Poland, everyone treated me like a Polish Person even if I didn't speak the language. I also had a Polish descendant from my Polish sidefight for Canada in WW2 as a member of the Devils Brigade who killed many German Nazis.

Can I say im Polish? Of course not I don't live there I live in Canada so im Canadian but I definitely have a Polish heritage.

"Ethnicity is the term for the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs. To be a member of an ethnic group is to conform to some or all of those practices.

Race and ethnicity can obviously overlap, but they are distinct."
(from Live Science website)

If you dig around in the old 'scholarly articles' that I'm so fond of recommending to the literate but sadly ignorant, you'll find that your views are in line with those of anthropologists from the 19th and to a lesser extent, 20th centuries but not from the present day. Also if you were better read on world history in general, instead of the stuff you learned by rote from the Kremlin Handbook of Nonsense, you'd be able to see it for yourself.

He's just repeated the opriginal joke of Radosław Sikorski who told it as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of Donald Tusk (PO). Possibly Radosław Sikorski was showing some kind of irony, but against whom is largely unknown (Obama himself?, Polish missionaries?, cannibals?, Polish people tracing down Polish ancestry in everyone? - I think the latter one is the most probable).


Excellent!

Wow, so much ignorance and racism in this thread!
I guess if you don't live in the Polish nation, you are not Polish. That means the multiple times our country seized to exist on maps, there were no longer any Poles! lol

And I guess if you don't speak Polish, you're not a Pole. So if you were born in Poland and have some type of speech disorder or are nonverbal you're not Polish at all lol

And finally, if you were born in Poland when it wasn't legally the "Polish nation" anymore, and you were born nonverbal, you're doubly screwed by the Polonia Police!

ROFLMAO I cannot believe this thread has stayed alive for 9 pages.

you cannot be Polish if you don't speak Polish.
in the same way- one cannot be considered English if one speaks no English (preferable English English).
considering how often Poland was conquered and mixed with their neighbors (nothing unusual on the continent Europe), sticking to DNA marks (assuming they are any) only is IMO stupidity; it's the cultural heritage (of which language is a big part) that matters; not whoever your parents were.

In Chicago, you are Polish if you speak Polish or Serbian

In London, you are Polish if you speak Polish or Lithuanian or Romanian. If Pole speaks English instead of Polish to Romanian in workplace it means he respects others and company regulations ;)

Being Polish and being raised in Polish culture, even in Diaspora, makes you Polish. Interesting how everyone refuses to answer whether a person born nonverbal in Poland is Polish or not.

Well I mean, there is Polish, there is American, and there is Polish-American.

"Plastic poles/polaks"
is used to put down polaks that grew up overseas and/or can't speak Polish

I personally feel language is a central part of being part of a culture. There are many Poles born overseas or relocated at a young age and were unable to attend Polish classes to learn the language. But the more an individual becomes involved in the culture - cooking, watching films, reading books; then they will naturally pick it up