Population
The present day Republic of Tunisia includes about ten million inhabitants, chiefly of Arab-Berber descent. Yet also a broad ethnic mix constitutes a substantial minority, coming from throughout the Mediterranean region, both east and west, many dating to the Phoenician, Roman, or Ottoman eras. Included are Sicilians and Greeks, Corsicans and French, Spanish and Germans, Egyptians and Jews, Circassians, Iranians, and Turks; also in this mix are Tunisians whose ancestry traces southward across the deserts to Black Africa. Arabic became the primary language following the 7th-century Muslim conquest, with French also widely spoken. Islam is the religion, 99% are said to be Sunni Muslims.
Read more about this topic: History Of Tunisia
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and a rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, “Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.””
—Marquis De Custine (1790–1857)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)