Polish diaspora in the context of "Polish people"

Polish (endonym: język polski, [ˈjɛ̃zɨk ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɨzna] or simply polski, [ˈpɔlskʲi] ) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic subgroup, within the Indo-European language family, and is written in the Latin script. It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth-most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects. It maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals.

The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and nine written vowels, including two nasal vowels (ę, ą) denoted by a reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek. Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases. It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants. Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries).

Immigrants from Eastern Europe and their descendants have been present in the United Kingdom, in small numbers, for several centuries, with subsequent large migrations in the 21st century. At times, British media also included people with Central European ancestry in this category. This is similar to the definition of Eastern European in the United States, Canada, and Australia: Coming from former Eastern Bloc countries.

There are roughly 2.2 million Eastern European nationals living in the UK, with the largest groups being Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian. This includes 1,429,000 nationals from EU8 countries, 570,000 nationals from EU2 countries, 29,000 from Cyprus, Malta, and Croatia outside of the EU's original fourteen (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden), and 216,000 from non-EU Europe.