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Minority language[2]
 &_160;Czech Republic
 &_160;Slovakia
 &_160;Romania
 &_160;Ukraine Most speakers of Polish live in Poland. Poland is one of the most homogeneous European countries with regard to its native language; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue due to World War II. Poland was forced to change its borders, which resulted in various migrations (World War II evacuation and expulsion, German expulsions, Operation Wisla) as well as in ethnic cleansing of the Poles accross the current borders such as during the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia. Nevertheless, after the Second World War the previously Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union retained a large amount of the Polish population unwilling or unable to undergo forced migration toward the post-1945 Poland. Even today ethnic Poles constitute large minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, and among the Poles in Ukraine. Polish is by far the most widely used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), and it is also present in other counties. In Ukraine, Polish is most often used in the Lviv and Lutsk regions. Western Belarus has an important Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions. Significant numbers of Polish speakers also inhabit Argentina, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Peru, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine, UAE, the UK, Uruguay and the United States. In the United States, Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as the language spoken at home about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English, or 0.25% of the U.S. population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census (over 50%) occur in three states Illinois (185,749), New York (111,740) and New Jersey (74,663).[4]
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