Population
In 2004 the department was recorded as having 745,805 inhabitants. The inhabitants are divided between three principal ethnicities; Ladino, K'iche' Maya and Mam Maya. Three languages are spoken in the department, broadly corresponding to the ethnic groups; Spanish, K'iche' and Mam. In 2004, 40.4% of the population was listed as non-indigenous (i.e. Ladino) and 59.6% as indigenous (mainly K'iche' and Mam). In 1999, average life expectancy was calculated as 63.7 years. In the same year, 63.7% of dwellings had electricity, 70.1% had drinking water and 92.5% had sanitation.
Each municipality is known for its different traditional indigenous dress, with the exceptions of Coatepeque, Colomba, Flores Costa Cuca and San Carlos Sija, where traditional clothing is not worn by the indigenous inhabitants. These trajes are manufactured by the local inhabitants themselves.
Read more about this topic: Quetzaltenango Department
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“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)
“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)
“The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)