Ethnic groups in Europe
indigenous peoples of 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 (5.3% of the EU population). 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.
“Ethnic groups in Europe” enters the record as indigenous peoples of Europe. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ethnic, groups and Europe can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1464982. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ethnic groups in Europe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.