MIDDLE EAST DEMOGRAPHICS

Ethnical Groups:

The Middle East is a vast region comprising of variety of ethnic groups having differing religions. Prominent amongst them include the Turks, Persians, Jews, Armenians, Georgians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Pashtuns, Persians, Azeris, Turkmen, Samaritans, Berbers, Kurds, Circassians and Africans. As far as religion is concerned, the Middle East has very diverse religious communities. Although Islam is the dominant religion in the Middle East having more than 90% followers, Judaism and Christianity also have sizeable followers in the Middle East. The Middle East has the distinction of being the origin of three of the major World Religions.

Linguistic:

The languages of the Middle East are diverse in nature and include families such as the Altaic families, Indo-European Families and the Afro-Asiatic families. Persian and Arabic are the predominant language in the Middle East. Apart from them, other languages that are spoken include Syriac, Azeri, Baluchi, Pashtu, Georgian, Hebrew, Kurdish, Turkish, Greek and Urdu. English is also spoken amongst most of the middle and the upper class people residing in Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Kuwait and Iraq. In some countries, French is preferred over English. These countries include Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Thanks to the migration of large number of south Asians, Hindi, Urdu and other South Asian languages are also spoken in a number of Middle Eastern nations such as Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Middle East also has the largest community of Romanian speaking community in the state of Israel where as much as 5% of the population converses in Romanian. Romanian language is also spoken by those Arab nations which had completed their education in Romania. In the 1980’s, as much as half million Arabs of the Middle East had their education in Romania. Thanks to emigration especially in the 1990’s, even Russian language is also spoken by large Israeli communities.

Miscellaneous: