Ethnic groups in Europe


Europeans are the focus of European ethnology, the field of anthropology related to the various ethnic groups that reside in the states of Europe. Groups may be defined by common ancestry, language, faith, historical continuity, etc. There are no universally accepted and precise definitions of the terms "ethnic group" and "nationality", but in the context of European ethnography in particular, the terms ethnic group, people, nationality and ethno-linguistic group are used as mostly synonymous. Preference may vary in usage with respect to the situation specific to the individual countries of Europe, and the context in which they may be classified by those terms.
The total number of national minority populations in Europe is estimated at 105 million people, or 14% of 770 million Europeans in 2002. The Russians are the most populous among Europeans, with a population of roughly 120 million.

Overview

In 2021, the number of non-EU nationals living in EU members states was 23.7 million. The countries with the largest population of non-nationals were Germany, Spain, France and Italy. These four Member States represented 70.3% of all non-EU nationals living in the EU Member States. The population of the European Union, with some 450 million residents, accounts for two thirds of the current European population.
Both Spain and the United Kingdom are special cases, in that the designation of nationality, Spanish and British, may controversially take ethnic aspects, subsuming various regional ethnic groups.
Switzerland is a similar case, but the linguistic subgroups of the Swiss are discussed in terms of both ethnicity and language affiliations.

Linguistic classifications

Of the total population of Europe of some 740 million, close to 90% fall within three large branches of Indo-European languages, these being:
Three stand-alone Indo-European languages do not fall within larger sub-groups and are not closely related to those larger language families, but are still languages that are used in areas considered part of the European continent:
In addition, there are also smaller sub-groups within the Indo-European languages of Europe, including:
Besides the Indo-European languages, there are other language families on the European continent which are considered unrelated to Indo-European:

Prehistoric populations

The Basques have been found to descend from the population of the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age directly.
By contrast, Indo-European groups of Europe migrated throughout most of Europe from the Pontic steppe. They are assumed to have developed in situ through admixture of earlier Mesolithic and Neolithic populations with Bronze Age, proto-Indo-Europeans.
The Finnic peoples are assumed to also be descended from Proto-Uralic populations further to the east, nearer to the Ural Mountains, that had migrated to their historical homelands in Europe by about 3,000 years ago.
Reconstructed languages of Iron Age Europe include Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic, all of these Indo-European languages of the centum group, and Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic, of the satem group. A group of Tyrrhenian languages appears to have included Etruscan, Rhaetian, Lemnian, and perhaps Camunic. A pre-Roman stage of Proto-Basque can only be reconstructed with great uncertainty.
Regarding the European Bronze Age, the only relatively likely reconstruction is that of Proto-Greek. A Proto-Italo-Celtic ancestor of both Italic and Celtic, and a Proto-Balto-Slavic language has been postulated with less confidence. Old European hydronymy has been taken as indicating an early Indo-European predecessor of the later centum languages.
According to geneticist David Reich, based on ancient human genomes that his laboratory sequenced in 2016, Europeans descend from a mixture of four distinct ancestral components.

Historical populations

populations of Europe known from Greco-Roman historiography, notably Herodotus, Pliny, Ptolemy and Tacitus:
Ethno-linguistic groups that arrived from outside Europe during historical times are:
The earliest accounts of European ethnography date from Classical Antiquity. Herodotus described the Scythians and Thraco-Illyrians. Dicaearchus gave a description of Greece itself, besides accounts of western and northern Europe. His work survives only fragmentarily, but was received by Polybius and others.
Roman Empire period authors include Diodorus Siculus, Strabo and Tacitus. Julius Caesar gives an account of the Celtic tribes of Gaul, while Tacitus describes the Germanic tribes of Magna Germania. A number of authors like Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias and Sallust depict the ancient Sardinian and Corsican peoples.
The 4th century Tabula Peutingeriana records the names of numerous peoples and tribes.
Ethnographers of Late Antiquity such as Agathias of Myrina, Ammianus Marcellinus, Jordanes, and Theophylact Simocatta give early accounts of the Slavs, the Franks, the Alamanni and the Goths.
Book IX of Isidore's Etymologiae treats de linguis, gentibus, regnis, militia, civibus.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan in the 10th century gives an account of the Bolghar and the Rus' peoples.
William Rubruck, while most notable for his account of the Mongols, in his account of his journey to Asia also gives accounts of the Tatars and the Alans.
Saxo Grammaticus and Adam of Bremen give an account of pre-Christian Scandinavia. The Chronicon Slavorum gives an account of the northwestern Slavic tribes.
Gottfried Hensel in his 1741 Synopsis Universae Philologiae published one of the earliest ethno-linguistic map of Europe, showing the beginning of the pater noster in the various European languages and scripts.
In the 19th century, ethnicity was discussed in terms of scientific racism, and the ethnic groups of Europe were grouped into a number of "races", Mediterranean, Alpine and Nordic, all part of a larger "Caucasian" group.
The beginnings of ethnic geography as an academic subdiscipline lie in the period following World War I, in the context of nationalism, and in the 1930s exploitation for the purposes of fascist and Nazi propaganda, so that it was only in the 1960s that ethnic geography began to thrive as a bona fide academic subdiscipline.
The origins of modern ethnography are often traced to the work of Bronisław Malinowski, who emphasized the importance of fieldwork.
The emergence of population genetics further undermined the categorisation of Europeans into clearly defined racial groups. A 2007 study on the genetic history of Europe found that the most important genetic differentiation in Europe occurs on a line from the north to the south-east, with another east–west axis of differentiation across Europe, separating the indigenous Basques, Sardinians and Sami from other European populations.
Despite these stratifications it noted the unusually high degree of European homogeneity: "there is low apparent diversity in Europe with the entire continent-wide samples only marginally more dispersed than single population samples elsewhere in the world."