Greeks

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Greeks
Έλληνες
Ioannis Kapodistrias • Pericles • El Greco • Alexander the Great • Eleftherios Venizelos
Total population
approx. 14,000,000–16,000,000 [1]

Regions with significant populations
 Greece 10,166,929 (2001 census) [2]
 United States 1,350,600^a (2008 est.) [3]
 Cyprus 635,914 (2001 census) [4]
 Australia 365,120^b (2006 census) [5]
 United Kingdom 400,000 (estimate) [6]
 Germany 294,891 (2007 est.) [7]
 Canada 242,685^c (2006 census) [8]
 France 210,000 (2009 est.) [9]
 Albania 200,000 [10]
 Russia 97,827 (2002) [11]
 Chile 90,000–120,000 [12]
 Ukraine 91,500 (2001 census) [13]
 South Africa 55,000 (2008 estimate) [14]
 Brazil 50,000^d [15]
 Italy 30,000 (2008 estimate) [16]
 Argentina 30,000 (2008 estimate) [17]
 Belgium 15,742 (2007) [18]
 Sweden 12,000–15,000 [19]
 Kazakhstan 13,000 (est) [20]
 Switzerland 11,000 estimated [21]
 Uzbekistan 9,500 estimate [22]
 Romania 6,500 2002 census [23]
 Turkey 2,500 [24]
Elsewhere see Greek diaspora
Languages

Greek

Religion

Greek Orthodox

Footnotes
^a An estimated 3,000,000 claim Greek descent.[25]
^b Only includes people of 1st and 2nd generation "Greek" background. Estimates of total "Greek" population in Australia ranges from 700,000 - 800,000.[1]
^c Those whose stated ethnic origins included "Greek" among others. The number of those whose stated ethnic origin is solely "Greek" is 145,250. An additional 3,395 Cypriots of undeclared ethnicity live in Canada.
^d "Including descendants".

The Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες, [ˈe̞line̞s]), also known as Hellenes, are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighbouring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world.[26]

Greek colonies and communities have been historically established in most corners of the Mediterranean but Greeks have always been centred around the Aegean Sea, where the Greek language has been spoken since antiquity.[27] Until the early twentieth century, Greeks were uniformly distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, Pontus, Egypt, Cyprus and Constantinople; many of these regions coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of the ancient Greek colonization.[28]

In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), a large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey transferred and confined ethnic Greeks almost entirely into the borders of the modern Greek state and Cyprus. Other ethnic Greek populations can be found from southern Italy to the Caucasus and in diaspora communities in a number of other countries. Today, the vast majority of Greeks are members of the Eastern Orthodox Church.[29]

History

The Greeks speak the Greek language, which forms its own unique branch within the Indo-European family of languages, the Hellenic.[27] They are part of a group of pre-modern ethnicities, described by Anthony D. Smith as an "archetypal diaspora people".[30][31]

The modern Greek state was created in 1832, when the Greeks liberated a part of their historic homelands from the Ottoman Empire.[32] The large Greek diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western romantic nationalism and philhellenism,[33] which together with the conception of Hellenism, formulated during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire, formed the basis of the Diafotismos and the current conception of Hellenism.[34][35][36]

Origins

The Proto-Greeks probably arrived at the area now referred to as Greece, in the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, at the end of the 3rd millennium BC.[37][38][a] The sequence of migrations into the Greek mainland during the 2nd millennium BC has to be reconstructed on the basis of the ancient Greek dialects, as they presented themselves centuries later and is subject to some uncertainties. There were at least two migrations, the first of the Ionians and Aeolians which resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th century BC,[27][39] and the second, the Dorian invasion, around the 11th century BC, displacing the Arcadocypriot dialects which descended from the Mycenaean period. Both migrations occur at incisive periods, the Mycenaean at the transition to the Late Bronze Age and the Doric at the Bronze Age collapse.

Across these assumed migrations, however, the transition from pre-Greek to Greek culture appears to have been rather gradual. Some archaeologists have pointed to evidence that there was a significant amount of continuity of prehistoric economic, architectural, and social structures, suggesting that the transition between the Neolithic civilisation of c.5000 BC and the Greek civilisations of later periods may have proceeded without major rifts in social texture.[40]

There were some suggestions of three waves of migration indicating a Proto-Ionian one, either contemporary or even earlier than the Mycenaean. This possibility appears to have been first suggested by Ernst Curtius in the 1880s. In current scholarship, the standard assumption is to group the Ionic together with the Arcadocypriot group as the successors of a single Middle Bronze Age migration in dual opposition to the "western" group of Doric.