ABSTRACT
Greece currently has a population of about 10,578,000 people spread over 131,957 km2. The country is divided into ten geographical regions. The Greek language is spoken by 95 per cent of the population. There are two groups of people acknowledged as minorities: the Muslim minority, which resides in Thrace in northern Greece, and the Roma minority, which is not limited to any geographical region. Adding to the diversity of the population are economic immigrants who officially amount to approximately 500,000. This figure, however, rises to almost 800,000 when illegal immigrants are included. More than half of these people come from Albania, and the remaining come mainly from Bulgaria, Romania, Pakistan, Ukraine, Poland and Georgia, with fewer from the Philippines and other countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Most of those immigrants are concentrated in the two large urban centres of Athens and Thessaloniki.
