It makes no difference if you've never been to Poland or if your parents don't understand a word of this weird Slavic language. If your surname ends in -ski, -cki, or -dzki, you are unquestionably Polish. That is, at least, the Polish line of thinking. If you happen to be called Kowalski, you get extra points on the Polishness scale.

After all, not all Poles' surnames end in -skis, and some of the more prominent Poles had names that sounded foreign (Fryderyk Chopin's father was of French ancestry, Marie Curie married a Frenchman named Pierre Curie). But that doesn't make us any less proud of the little suffixes we spot in the closing credits of a Hollywood film (in fact, name spotting is one of the most peculiar Polish hobbies, along with mushroom hunting).

Do you have a Polish surname? Have you ever wondered how many people you share it with?

Below you will find a list of the ten most common surnames in Poland, as reported by the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs in January 2020. As it turns out, Nowaks are more numerous than Kowalskis, yet it is the latter which is considered to be the most characteristic Polish name.

As you can see, some of the names come in two variants - they are practically the same but the suffix depends on whether the person in question is a man (e.g. Kowalski) or a woman (e.g. Kowalska). The others (e.g. Nowak) are not gender-inflected, meaning the form does not change depending on the person's gender.