The registered German minority in Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

consists of 152,900 people, according to a 2002 census.

The German language

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 is used in certain areas in Opole Voivodeship

Opole Voivodeship

- Administrative division :Opole Voivodeship is divided into 12 counties : 1 city county and 11 land counties. These are further divided into 71 gminas.The counties are listed in the following table .- Economy :...

 (German: Oppeln), where most of the minority resides. The German minority electoral list currently has one seat in the Polish parliament (Sejm

Sejm

The Sejm is the lower house of the Polish parliament. The Sejm is made up of 460 deputies, or Poseł in Polish . It is elected by universal ballot and is presided over by a speaker called the Marshal of the Sejm ....

) benefiting from the provision in the current Polish Election Law which allows national minorities to be exempt from the 5 per cent national threshold (there were four from 1993 to 1997).

There are 325 Polish schools that use the German language as the first language of instruction, with over 37,000 students attending them.