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:
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)