The present-day national structure of Slovakia is, among others, the result of a long-term population and residential development, to a high degree conditioned by migrations, but also by political interventions from above that also influences the formation of linguistic frontiers and regions. The study aims to present a general overview of the ways how ethnicity (ethnic identity) was perceived from the point of view of statistics (official state censuses) to characterize the basic sources for the study of ethnicities in Slovakia and thus to sketch the ethnic composition of Slovakia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century according to the atributes valid and observed in the studied period.
The article is based on the results of ethnographic field research which the author has conducted over the last 20 years in multi-lingual and multi-faith villages of Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands in the Grodno region in Belarus. The residents of kolkhoz villages of the region turned out to be unfamiliar with the scholarly term "borderlands". They describe their pluralistic social and cultural reality by means of an underlying metaphor (conceptual archetype) of a mixed world. This emic (subjective) category of describing the social world is subjected in the article to an anthropological analysis and interpretation. The author considers also the emic conceptualisation of the significant differences between "ethnic" groups.