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After centuries of relative ethnic diversity, the population of modern Poland has become nearly completely ethnically homogeneous Polish as a result of altered borders and the Nazi German and Soviet or Polish Communist population transfers, expulsions and deportations (from or to Poland) during and after World War II. Ethnic minorities remain in Poland, however, including some newly arrived or increased in number. Ethnic groups include Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Although the concept of an ethnic minority is mostly used about a modern period, Poland has historically been a multi-ethnic country. The early influx of Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks, and Germans was particularly notable, and they formed significant minorities (or majorities) in urban centers. Walloons migrated to Poland probably since the 12th century, however, the first written mention of Walloon immigrants in Wrocław comes from c. 1270. [1] Armenians and Scots, who formed notable communities, lived in Poland since the 14th century. After the late-14th-century Polish–Lithuanian union and the Union of Lublin, which established the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, Lithuanians and Ruthenians became part of the population.
A 1493 estimate listed the combined population of Poland and Lithuania at 7.5 million, broken down by ethnicity:
In 1618, after the Truce of Deulino, the Commonwealth's territory increased and its population reached 12 million. Its inhabitants could be roughly divided into:
At that time, the szlachta (nobility) were 10 percent of the population and the burghers 15 percent. [3]
With the population and territorial losses of the mid- and late 17th century, the 1717 population of the Commonwealth had declined to nine million in the following ethnic groups:
According to the 1921 Polish census, 30.8 percent of the population were ethnic minorities. [4] This increased due to the Polish victory in the Polish-Soviet War and the large territorial gains in the east as a consequence. According to the 1931 Polish census (as cited by Norman Davies), [5] 68.9 percent of the population was Polish, 13.9 percent were Ukrainians, about 10 percent Jewish, 3.1 percent Belarusians, 2.3 percent Germans and 2.8 percent other groups (including Lithuanians, Czechs and Armenians). There were also smaller communities of Russians and Romani people. The minority situation was complex and fluid during the period.
Poland was also a nation of many religions. In 1921, 16,057,229 Poles (about 62.5 percent) were Roman Catholics, 3,031,057 (about 11.8 percent) were Eastern Rite Catholics (primarily Ukrainian Greek and Armenian Rite Catholics), 2,815,817 (about 10.95 percent) were Greek Orthodox, 2,771,949 (about 10.8 percent) were Jewish, and 940,232 (about 3.7 percent) were Protestants (mostly Lutherans). [6] Poland had the world's second-largest Jewish population by 1931: one-fifth, about 3,136,000. [4]
Before World War II, one-third of Poland's population belonged to ethnic minority groups. Poland's minorities were mostly gone after the war, however, due to the 1945 revision of borders and the Holocaust. Under the National Repatriation Office (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny), millions of Poles were forced to leave their homes in the eastern Kresy region and settle in territories regained from Germany in the west. About five million remaining Germans (about eight million had already fled or been expelled, and about one million had been killed between 1944 and 1946) were similarly expelled from those territories to Allied-occupied Germany in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement. Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities found themselves now mostly within the borders of the Soviet Union; those who opposed this new policy (like the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Bieszczady Mountains region) were suppressed by the end of 1947 in Operation Vistula.
The Jewish population of Poland, the largest Jewish community in pre-war Europe at about 3.3 million people, was almost completely destroyed by 1945. Approximately three million Jews died of starvation in ghettos and labor camps, or were slaughtered in Nazi extermination camps or by Einsatzgruppen death squads. Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland, another 50,000 to 170,000 were repatriated from the Soviet Union, and 20,000 to 40,000 came from Germany and other countries. There were 180,000 to 240,000 Jews in Poland at the country's postwar peak, settled mainly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków and Wrocław. [7]
The rights of ethnic minorities in Poland are guaranteed in article 35 of the 1997 Constitution:
The Act on Ethnic and National Minorities and on the Regional Language of 6 January 2005 (Polish : Ustawa o mniejszościach narodowych i etnicznych oraz o języku regionalnym) [8] stipulates that to be recognized as an ethnic or national minority, a group must reside in Poland for at least 100 years; this excludes minorities recognized by the Communist regime, such as the Greeks. [9] There are three categories of recognized minorities in Poland: nine national minorities (Belarusians, Czechs, Lithuanians, Germans, Armenians, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians and Jews), four ethnic minorities (Karaites, Lemkos, Roma and Tatars), and the regional Kashubian linguistic minority. [8] [10]
Poland ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages on 12 February 2009: [11]
Minorities have a number of rights, including street signs and education in their native language, cultural development and non-assimilation. In municipalities ( gminy ) where they constitute more than 20 percent of the population, they have the right to official communications in their native language. Such municipalities must be included on the official register of municipalities where an additional language is used, and incentives exist for officials of these municipalities to learn the regional language. [8]
In the Polish census of 2002, 96.7 percent claimed Polish nationality and 97.8 percent said that they speak Polish at home. [12] In the 2011 census, 1.44 percent of Poland's 39 million inhabitants said that they had an ancestry other than Polish. That figure included 418,000 who identified as Silesian (362,000 as a single ethnicity and 391,000 as a second ethnicity) and 17,000 Kashubians (16,000 as a single ethnicity). Recognized minorities were 0.3 percent of the population: 49,000 Germans (26,000 a single ethnicity), 36,000 Ukrainians (26,000 single-ethnicity), 7,000 Lemkos (5,000 single-ethnicity), 37,000 Belarusians (31,000 single-ethnicity), 12,000 Roma people (9,000 single-ethnicity), and 8,000 Russians (5,000 single-ethnicity); 0.2 percent of the population were foreign citizens. [13] [14]
2002 census:
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Demographic features of the population of Lithuania include population density, ethnicity, level of education, health, economic status, and religious affiliations.
Ruthenian and Ruthene are exonyms of Latin origin, formerly used in Eastern and Central Europe as common ethnonyms for Ukrainians and partially Belarusians, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods. The Latin term Rutheni was used in medieval sources to describe Eastern Slavs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as an exonym for people of the former Kievan Rus', thus including ancestors of the modern Belarusians, Rusyns and Ukrainians. The use of Ruthenian and related exonyms continued through the early modern period, developing several distinctive meanings, both in terms of their regional scopes and additional religious connotations.
Polish people, or Poles, are a West Slavic ethnic group and nation who share a common history, culture, the Polish language and are identified with the country of Poland in Central Europe. The preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland defines the Polish nation as comprising all the citizens of Poland, regardless of heritage or ethnicity. The majority of Poles adhere to Roman Catholicism.
The Poles come from different West Slavic tribes living on territories belonging later to Poland in the early Middle Ages.
Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland and annexed territories totalling 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi) with a population of 13,299,000. Inhabitants besides ethnic Poles included Belarusian and Ukrainian major population groups, and also Czechs, Lithuanians, Jews, and other minority groups.
Lemkos are an ethnic group inhabiting the Lemko Region of Carpathian Rus', an ethnographic region in the Carpathian Mountains and foothills spanning Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland.
Silesians is both an ethnic as well as a geographical term for the inhabitants of Silesia, a historical region in Central Europe divided by the current national boundaries of Poland, Germany, and Czechia. Historically, the region of Silesia has been inhabited by Polish, Czechs, and by Germans. Therefore, the term Silesian can refer to anyone of these ethnic groups. However, in 1945, great demographic changes occurred in the region as a result of the Potsdam Agreement leaving most of the region ethnically Polish and/or Slavic Upper Silesian. The Silesian language is one of the regional languages used in Poland alongside Polish as well as Kashubian and is structured with in a SVO format, however the grammar is quite often different to that of the other Lechitic languages. The names of Silesia in different languages most likely share their etymology—Polish: ; German: Schlesienpronounced[ˈʃleːzi̯ən] ; Czech: Slezsko ; Lower Silesian: Schläsing; Silesian: Ślōnsk ; Lower Sorbian: Šlazyńska ; Upper Sorbian: Šleska ; Latin, Spanish and English: Silesia; French: Silésie; Dutch: Silezië; Italian: Slesia; Slovak: Sliezsko; Kashubian: Sląsk. The names all relate to the name of a river and mountain in mid-southern Silesia, which served as a place of cult for pagans before Christianization.
The city of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and its surrounding region has a long history. The Vilnius Region has been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the Lithuanian state's founding in the late Middle Ages to its destruction in 1795, i.e. five centuries. From then, the region was occupied by the Russian Empire until 1915, when the German Empire invaded it. After 1918 and throughout the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, Vilnius was disputed between the Republic of Lithuania and the Second Polish Republic. After the city was seized by the Republic of Central Lithuania with Żeligowski's Mutiny, the city was part of Poland throughout the Interwar period. Regardless, Lithuania claimed Vilnius as its capital. During World War II, the city changed hands many times, and the German occupation resulting in the destruction of Jews in Lithuania. From 1945 to 1990, Vilnius was the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic's capital. From the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Vilnius has been part of Lithuania.
The Crimean Karaites or simply Karaites, also known more broadly as Eastern European Karaites, are a traditionally Turkic-speaking Judaic ethnoreligious group indigenous to Crimea. Nowadays, most Karaim in Eastern Europe speak the dominant local language of their respective regions.
Western Belorussia or Western Belarus is a historical region of modern-day Belarus which belonged to the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period. For twenty years before the 1939 invasion of Poland, it was the northern part of the Polish Kresy macroregion. Following the end of World War II in Europe, most of Western Belorussia was ceded to the Soviet Union by the Allies, while some of it, including Białystok, was given to the Polish People's Republic. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western Belorussia formed the western part of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Today, it constitutes the west of modern Belarus.
The Belarusian minority in Poland is composed of 47,000 people according to the Polish census of 2011. This number decreased in the last decades from over 300,000 due to an active process of assimilation. Most of them live in the Podlaskie Voivodeship.
The bilingual status of gminas (municipalities) in Poland is regulated by the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Languages, which permits certain gminas with significant linguistic minorities to introduce a second, auxiliary language to be used in official contexts alongside Polish. So far 44 gminas have done this:
The population of Armenia includes various significant minority ethnic groups.
The Polish population transfers in 1944–1946 from the eastern half of prewar Poland, were the forced migrations of Poles toward the end and in the aftermath of World War II. These were the result of a Soviet Union policy that had been ratified by the main Allies of World War II. Similarly, the Soviet Union had enforced policies between 1939 and 1941 which targeted and expelled ethnic Poles residing in the Soviet zone of occupation following the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. The second wave of expulsions resulted from the retaking of Poland from the Wehrmacht by the Red Army. The USSR took over territory for its western republics.
The Polish census of 1931 or Second General Census in Poland was the second census taken in sovereign Poland during the interwar period, performed on December 9, 1931 by the Main Bureau of Statistics. It established that Poland's population amounted to almost 32 million people.
The government of Lithuania has made provision for ethnic minorities since 1918. A substantial Jewish group that existed up to World War II was almost eliminated in the Holocaust. The Census of 2011 showed that 15.8% of inhabitants belonged to ethnic minorities: the two largest groups were the Poles and the Russians, although the proportions had decreased since independence in 1989. Other minorities include the Samogitians - not classified in the Census - and the historically important Latvian-speaking Kursenieki.
Krakovets is a rural settlement in Yavoriv Raion, Lviv Oblast, in western Ukraine. It lies on the Polish-Ukrainian border, roughly halfway between Lviv in Ukraine and Kraków in Poland on the European route E40, hosting the Korczowa-Krakovets border crossing. Krakovets belongs to Yavoriv urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. The population was estimated at 1,154 .
The languages of Poland include Polish – the language of the native population – and those of immigrants and their descendants. Polish is the only official language recognized by the country's constitution and the majority of the country's population speak it as a native language or use it for home communication. Deaf communities in Poland use Polish Sign Language, which belongs to the German family of Sign Languages.
Historically, Białystok has been a destination for internal and foreign immigration, especially from Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to the Polish minority in 19th century, there was a significant Jewish majority in Białystok. According to Russian census of 1897, out of the total population of 66,000, Jews constituted 41,900. In 1936, Białystok had a population of 99,722, of whom: 50.9% (50,758) were Poles, 42.6% (42,482) Jews, 2.1% (2,094) Germans and 0.4% (359) Russians. World War II changed all of this, in 1939, ca. 107,000 persons lived in Białystok, but in 1946 – only 56,759, and to this day there is much less ethnic diversity than in the previous 300 years of the city's history. Currently the city's population is 97% Polish, 2.5% Belarusian and 0.5% of a number of minorities including Russians, Lipka Tartars, Ukrainians and Romani. Most of the modern day population growth is based on internal migration and urbanization.
The various regional and minority languages in Europe encompass four categories:
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