This article focuses on young people in Poland and their ways of constructing identity. The research is based on fieldwork conducted in 2013-2014 among (605) Polish secondary school students. The respondents were asked to answer the “Twenty Statements Test” and, later on, to write down their own associations related to the notion of identity. The obtained data comprises answers provided by the respondents, whose places of residence are characterised by a high num- ber of people declaring nationality other than Polish (according to the Polish National Survey of 2011) and whose places of residence are homogenous in terms of national affi liations. The collected empirical data was suffi cient to indicate six milieus in which human identity is constructed: personality, gender, family, religion, language, and “space” (i.e., people’s identifications with a region, state, or nation). The first four milieus were very frequently placed in statements produced by the secondary school students. When confronted with the question “Who are you”, the secondary school students were no longer willing to say “I’m a Pole/ German/Silesian”. Perhaps the 21st century marks a time when nations or states are no longer relevant spaces of domestication and people are more willing to refer to cities or regions in their quest for identification.

The regulations concerning the definition of the official language at the constitutional level have not been unified in the constitutions of European Union countries. The importance of a language, the level of its protection, and care for the language are immanently connected with the cultural awareness of a given nation, its historical conditions, national aspirations, and other factors allowing to distinguish it from other subjects. The number of languages used in individual regions of the EU depends on social migrations, the uniformity of nationalities, historical conditions, as well as the level and directions of patriotic aspirations in a given society. Therefore, the attempts to impose on the members of the EU the adoption of the unified solutions, which de facto imply - in the case of most of them - the need to amend the constitution, is a demand that now seems completely unfeasible.