Polish diaspora in the context of "Polish language"

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 population of self-declared Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of an overall population of 38,512,000 (based on the 2011 census), of whom 36,522,000 declared Polish alone. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora (the Polonia) exists throughout Eurasia, the Americas, and Australasia. Today, the largest urban concentrations of Poles are within the Warsaw metropolitan area and the Katowice urban area.

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.