Introduction

Poland is the sixth largest country in Europe and possibly the most homogeneous in its linguistic, cultural, and religious makeup. There are approximately 50 million people worldwide who speak Polish, including 38 million living in Poland and approximately 12 million forming the Polish diaspora. Most Poles living abroad reside in the USA, and in fact the largest Polish city after Warsaw in terms of numbers of Polish speakers is Chicago (Stecuła 2007). As shown in Table 1.1, Polish currently occupies the twelfth spot on the list of the top twelve non-English languages spoken in the USA.

This chapter explores the history of Polish immigration to the USA, current demographics, changes in Poland and in US immigration policy, and the role of the media, business, and education in keeping Polish among the most common languages other than English spoken in the USA today.

History

Polish belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and to the subgroup of Slavic languages of Central and Eastern Europe. The core of the Polish lexicon is Slavic, but a considerable number of words in the Polish vocabulary are derived directly from Latin or have origins in Latin or Greek. Over the past ten centuries, German settlers from across the border to the West established artisan guilds and helped develop cities and commerce. Polish-Germans are credited with operating the first printing shops in the Renaissance Kingdom of Poland and they became instrumental in codifying Polish orthography and grammar.