Lithuanian minority in Poland

The Lithuanian minority in Poland consists of 8,000 people (according to the Polish census of 2011) living chiefly in the Podlaskie Voivodeship in the north-eastern part of Poland. The Lithuanian embassy in Poland notes that there are about 15,000 people in Poland of Lithuanian ancestry.

Lithuanians are an indigenous people of the territories of north-eastern Podlaskie Voivodeship in Poland, being the descendants of the various Baltic tribes of the region (Yotvingians), which merged into the Lithuanian ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Poland first acquired its Lithuanian minority after the Union of Lublin in 1569, which transferred the administration of the historical Podlaskie Voivodeship from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Polish Crown (both entities then formed a larger, federated state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). During the next two centuries, the Lithuanian minority, faced with the dominant Polish culture in the region, was subject to Polonization. After the partitions of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 18th century, the Polish cultural pressure in the region was replaced by that of the Russian Empire, until the end of the First World War resulted in the restoration of independent Polish and Lithuanian states.

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