[size=55:22937szm]Sofia echo
How many foreigners live in Bulgaria?
In Bulgarian politics, conventional wisdom is that if you want to know how many ethnic Turks live in Bulgaria, look at the most recent election results to see how many votes Ahmed Dogan’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms got.
Well, here’s a comparison. According to the results of Bulgaria’s 2011 census, there are 585 024 people in Bulgaria who described themselves as being of Turkish ethnicity. A comparison: Dogan’s party got 610 521 votes in the July 2009 parliamentary elections, according to official records.
Assuming a direct correlation between Turkish ethnicity and voting for the MRF, and even allowing for the fact that some people counted in the census must have been below voting age, that does show a difference of about 25 500, give or take a vote or two. That may suggest that the MRF is able to reach beyond its traditional constituency. Oh, and any of Dogan’s detractors by now would be mumbling slanderously about vote-buying, no doubt.
But let’s move on, because you started reading this because the headline suggested this story would be about the number of foreigners living in Bulgaria, and who cares about the arcane practices of Bulgarian politics. In fact, that MRF story was there to show that the tale told by Census 2011 is one that requires a touch of interpretation, a dab of guesswork and probably too, a pocket calculator.
It also requires you to be able to understand Bulgarian, the only language in which the results were posted on the website of the National Statistics Institute. But then again, the language of Bulgaria is Bulgarian, officially, and by the way, of this country’s population of 7 364 570 people, about 5.6 million gave Bulgarian as their mother tongue.
Minor arcana
Which means that about 1.7 million people in Bulgaria do not use Bulgarian as their mother tongue.
So how many speak English? I hear you cry. Wait a bit, I’ve been too busy reading small-print spreadsheets and tapping on a calculator to give that away just yet.
Of the non-Bulgarian speakers, the mother-tongue list is:
Turkish 604 246 (sorry to harp on this, but that means more people speak Turkish than declare themselves to be ethnic Turks, but we shall get back to that);
Romani 280 979;
Armenian 5567;
Hebrew 141;
Vlach 1815;
Russian 15 211;
Tatar 1367;
Arabic 1321;
Greek 3182;
Macedonian 1376;
Romanian 5454;
and
Wait for it… "
Other"
9946.
Major arcana
That was, I hope, an interesting digression, but really may only indicate the mother tongue of people holding Bulgarian passports, even though foreigners were counted in this year’s census.
To try to get to the number of English-speakers, it is necessary to go to the table of details about foreigners who were in Bulgaria at that golden point in February 2011. Remember that figures for nationalities do not count in diplomats, who by law were excluded from being tallied in the census.
There are, for the record, 36 723 foreigners in Bulgaria, or at least there were in February 2011. Of these, by the by, 16 292 are men and 20 431 women.
From European Union member states, there were 8444, with the United Kingdom making up the biggest share of the EU group, at 2605 (1504 men and 1101 women).
Greece follows at 1253 (914 men and 339 women), Germany at 848 (515 men and 333 women), Poland at 819 (274 men and 545 women), Italy at 456 (376 men and 80 women) and the Czech Republic at 372 (128 men, 244 women). As a matter of interest, 26th on the list was Luxembourg, at four (all men).
Of non-EU Europe, unsurprisingly perhaps, Russia is top of the list, at 11 991 (this time, women far outnumber men – 2518 men and 9473 women;
if anyone knows why this is so, please write and tell me).
Further in this category, there are Ukraine (3064), Macedonia (1091), Moldova (893) and Serbia (569);
like the EU states, others straggle along to make up a total of foreign residents from non-EU Europe of 18 413.
From Africa, there were 429 people at the time of the census. Egypt topped the list, at 62, followed by Algeria, 59, and Nigeria, 50. These figures make the number of my South African compatriots quite respectable;
it seems I am one of 37, and we are close to evenly split between men and women, politically-correct lot that we are.
From Asia, Turkey had 2741 (2221 men, 520 women) – so presumably we can add that figure to the number of ethnic Turks to bump up the number of Turkish-speakers – followed by Armenia (1167), China (749), Syria (729), Iraq (506) and Vietnam (173). For those who track Turkey’s EU bid, please note that the census classified Turkey as an Asian country.
Говорите ли Aнглийски?
Clearly, the only way to try to establish the number of English-speakers is to add up the number of people recorded as having been from countries either officially English-speaking, effectively so or where English is in common usage or, to jazz this up a little, where they reasonably may be expected to speak English;
and no rude chauvinistic comments please, about each other’s forms of English (The Sofia Echo lives in a world where "
the colour of the pavement is grey"
rather than the "
color of the sidewalk is gray"
but that’s just our choice).
So, we have, as noted, 2605 people from the UK. Add the United States (524), Canada (64), Ireland (78), India (123), South Africa (37), Australia (34), New Zealand (11), Nigeria (50), Malta (eight) and round up a bit for a few people from other former colonial spots, throw in a guesstimate of people from countries likely to have a least a rudimentary-to-working knowledge of English, and you get something like 3500 to 4000 people, and even that higher figure may be conservative. Remember that under "
mother tongue"
the total in the "
Other"
category was 9946.
To complicate matters, under the category "
did not declare"
is the figure 47 458. But then again, while not putting on the spreadsheet a separate category for the English language, there also was not one for German, Italian, Spanish or French.
And finally, of course, there seems to be no official figure anywhere for the number of people, Bulgarians or foreigners in Bulgaria, who have English as a second language. That would require, presumably, a stout pair of shoes, a clipboard, paper, a pencil, time and funding. And no doubt, someone would ask why it was worth knowing at all.
Population count
The population of Bulgaria as of February 2011 is 7 364 570 people, of whom a third live in the country’s three biggest cities, Sofia, Varna and Plovdiv, according to the official results of this year’s census.
The results were announced at a news conference on July 21 2011
Ethnic Bulgarians make up 84.8 per cent (5 664 624 people), ethnic Turkish Bulgarians 8.8 per cent (588 318 people) and Roma 4.9 per cent (325 343 people), according to the census.
Of the overall population, 51.3 per cent are women and 48.7 per cent men.
About 72.5 per cent of the population live in cities. Sofia, which along with Varna has seen a population increase since the 2001 census, has 1 291 591 residents.
Sofia has seen a population increase of 10.3 per cent and Varna 2.8 per cent. The districts of Veliko Turnovo and Bourgas also have seen increases in population.
The biggest decreases in population have been in Lovetch (17.1 per cent), Vidin (16.2 per cent), Silistra (15.1 per cent) Razgrad (13 per cent) and Pleven (12.2 per cent).
Bourgas is the fourth-largest district, with 415 817 people, followed by Stara Zagora (333 265) and Blagoevgrad (232 552).
Census officials said that there were 255 cities and towns, together home to 5 339 001 people (72.5 per cent) and 50 047 villages, together with 2 025 569 residents (27.5 per cent) while in 181 settlements, the census recorded no people.
Twenty-one per cent of settlements had up to 50 residents and 36 per cent had between 100 and 500.
From people’s declarations of their religious affiliations, census officials concluded that Orthodox Christians made up 76 per cent of the population, Muslims 10 per cent. Protestants 1.1 per cent and Roman Catholics 0.8 per cent.
Mon Aug 08, 2011 7:02 pm
