World Language Map

Where is Polish spoken?

Polish (polszczyzna) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Poland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Germany and 7 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Polish is spoken

Polish is spoken in 11 countries: Poland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Germany and 7 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Poland96%37,196,448
United Kingdom4%2,738,364
Ukraine2.4%855,883
Germany0.3%243,945
Canada0.6%217,251
Israel1.5%141,039
Czechia0.5%53,106
Slovakia0.9%51,742
BelarusNot givenNot given
LithuaniaNot givenNot given
RussiaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Polish is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Polish.

How many people speak Polish?

Wikidata gives about 39.7 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 454,000 second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Polish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Polish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Balto-Slavic
  4. Slavic
  5. West Slavic
  6. Lechitic
  7. Polish-Silesian
  8. Polish

Related languages

Other languages in the Polish-Silesian group:

More about Polish

Codes: ISO 639-3 pol, Glottolog poli1260. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Polish

Where is Polish spoken?

Polish is spoken in Poland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Germany and 7 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 96% of the population of Poland, which is about 37,196,448 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Polish?

Wikidata gives about 39.7 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 454,000 second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013).

Which language family is Polish in?

Glottolog places Polish in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, West Slavic, Lechitic and Polish-Silesian.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.