Ethnic groups in Europe
Both Spain and the United Kingdom are special cases, in that the designation of nationality, Spanish and British, may controversially[citation needed] take ethnic aspects, subsuming various regional ethnic groups (see nationalisms and regionalisms of Spain and native populations of the United Kingdom).
Switzerland is a similar case, but the linguistic subgroups of the Swiss are discussed in terms of both ethnicity and language affiliations.
They are assumed to have developed in situ through admixture of earlier Mesolithic and Neolithic populations with Bronze Age, proto-Indo-Europeans.
[9][10][11] 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.
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.
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 (7th century) treats de linguis, gentibus, regnis, militia, civibus (concerning languages, peoples, realms, war and cities).
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.
One criterion is the so-called "time element", or how long the original inhabitants of a land occupied it before the arrival of later settlers.
The most extreme view claims that all Europeans are "descendants of previous waves of immigrants", and as such, the countries of Europe are no different from the United States or Canada with regards to who settled where.
[22] Some groups that claim Indigenous minority status in Europe include the Uralic Nenets, Samoyed, and Komi peoples of northern Russia; Circassians of southern Russia and the North Caucasus; Crimean Tatars, Krymchaks and Crimean Karaites of Crimea (Ukraine); Sámi peoples of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland and northwestern Russia (in an area also referred to as Sápmi); Galicians of Galicia, Spain; Catalans of Catalonia, Spain and southern France; Basques of Basque Country, Spain and southern France; Gaels of Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and the Isle of Man; Also the Silesian and Sorbian people of Germany and Poland.
Medieval notions of a relation of the peoples of Europe are expressed in terms of genealogy of mythical founders of the individual groups.
In this tradition, the Historia Brittonum (9th century) introduces a genealogy of the peoples of the Migration Period based on the sixth-century Frankish Table of Nations as follows: The first man that dwelt in Europe was Alanus, with his three sons, Hisicion, Armenon, and Neugio.
From Hisicion arose four nations—the Franks, the Latins, the Germans, and Britons; from Armenon, the Gothi, Valagothi, Cibidi, Burgundi, and Longobardi; from Neugio, the Bogari, Vandali, Saxones, and Tarincgi.
[64] Due to the great number of perspectives which can be taken on the subject, it is impossible to form a single, all-embracing conception of European culture.
[70] The term has come to apply to countries whose history has been strongly marked by European immigration or settlement during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the Americas, and Australasia, and is not restricted to Europe.
There are three major denominations: Roman Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, with Protestantism restricted mostly to Northern Europe, and Orthodoxy to East and South Slavic regions, Romania, Moldova, Greece, Cyprus, and Georgia.
[86] Islam has some tradition in the Balkans and the Caucasus due to conquest and colonization from the Ottoman Empire in the 16th to 19th centuries, as well as earlier though discontinued long-term presence in much of Iberia as well as Sicily.
Muslims account for the majority of the populations in Albania, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Northern Cyprus (controlled by Turks), and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
[90] Judaism has a long history in Europe, but is a small minority religion, with France (1%) the only European country with a Jewish population in excess of 0.5%.
[91] In the 21st century, France has the largest Jewish population in Europe,[91][92] followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.
According to a Pew Research Center Survey in 2012 the Religiously Unaffiliated (Atheists and Agnostics) make up about 18.2% of the European population in 2010.
[94] According to the same Survey the Religiously Unaffiliated make up the majority of the population in only two European countries: Czech Republic (76%) and Estonia (60%).
