[8] The most spoken languages are Mesopotamian Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian Syriac and Iraqi Turkmen dialects.

[10] It was rescheduled to November 2022[11][12] but was postponed again with an "electronic national population census" planned in the last quarter of 2023.

According to the CIA World Factbook, citing a 1987 Iraqi government estimate, the population of Iraq is formed of 75-80% Arabs (including Marsh Arabs) followed by 15-20% Kurds and other minorities form 5% of the country's population, including the Turkmen, Kaka'i, Bedouins, Roma, Assyrians, Circassians, Mandaeans, and Persians.

[29] However, the International Crisis Group points out that figures from the 1987 census, as well as the 1967, 1977, and 1997 censuses, "are all considered highly problematic, due to suspicions of regime manipulation" because Iraqi citizens were only allowed to indicate belonging to either the Arab or Kurdish ethnic groups;[30] consequently, this skewed the number of other ethnic minorities, such as Iraq's third largest ethnic group – the Turkmen.

Arabic is taught across all schools in Iraq, however in the north the Kurdish language is the most spoken.

[31] While there has been voluntary relocation of many Christian families to northern Iraq, recent reporting indicates that the overall Christian population may have dropped by as much as 50 percent since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, with many fleeing to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon (2010 estimate).