Polish Through the Ages
Polish is spoken by approx. 50-60 million people as their native language; of them, 38 million live in Poland proper. In addition, there are large Polish minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, in Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union (together approx. 1 million), but also in the USA (approx. 600,000 native speakers), in Canada, Germany (up to 2 million) and France (1 million). Recently in the course of the EU enlargement to the east, there was a large wave of immigration to Great Britain.
Polish (Polish: jezyk polski) belongs to the Western Slavic languages and is closely related to the Czech, the Slovakian and the Sorbian which is spoken by the Sorbian minority in Germany.
Polish has been an official language of the European Union since 2004. Polish is considered as one of the most important European languages and is mentioned seriatim with English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. The reasons probably involve Poland's economic upturn, but also have to do with the vast number of Polish immigrants in Western Europe, who form a large minority in some countries.
Poland has a close political and social link to the USA too, where at present approx. 10 million descendents of Polish emigrants live. Observation indicates that English is having a particularly substantial influence on the Polish at this time.
