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)
“We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“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)