2011 Census Results

Last year, the ČSÚ - Český Statistický Úřad (Czech Statistical Office) conducted the 2011 Population and Housing Census. It takes a while to compile all of the data and the final numbers will be published in Q3/2012. However, here are some of the more interesting preliminary results.

The population has increased. Yes, there is an increasing birth rate but it's mostly because there are more foreigners living in the ČR. In the last decade the number of foreigners has increased more than 260%. There are almost half a million of us here now.

The largest number of foreigners come from Ukraine, followed by Slovakia, Vietnam, Russia, Germany and Poland. The majority of foreigners live in Prague.

What Americans call "nationality", the Czechs refer to as "citizenship" and what Americans call "ethnicity", is referred to here as "nationality". So in the USA my nationality is American and my ethnicity is Mexican. But here my citizenship is American and my nationality is Mexican. Good grief this gets confusing sometimes!!

A greater number of people opted out of declaring their nationality. The largest number of people who did declare it are Czech (Bohemian) - 6.7 million. The second largest group is Moravian (522,474 people) and Slovaks came in third with 149,140. Almost twice as people claimed to be Moravian then they did 10 years ago. The vast majority live in South Moravia.

There is a big increase (46.6%) in the number of people with a university degree. Prague has the highest number of university degrees. Every fifth person in the capital has a university degree. While the number of high school dropouts has decreased there are 24.6% more people in the country who have not attended school at all.

Society is getting older. There are more people over 65 and the number of children (up to age 14) is decreasing.

Divorce is on the rise and fewer people are getting married. I've been told that under communism, it was quite often for people to get married at 18 and start having kids because this helped you get an apartment from the government. It looks like now people, who do get married, are waiting until they are older.

For the first time, same sex couples were able to state registered partnerships on the census. Since it's new there is no way to compare the data but it was declared by 2,055 people.

Fewer people answered the optional question about religion. Ten years ago, less than 1 million people skipped the question while this year 5 million chose not to answer.

The largest religious groups were the Roman Catholic Church (over 1 million), the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren (+50,000) and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church (+39,000). Over 700,000 people said that they were believers but not belong to any registered churches.

I don't know if it was a massive joke or not but over 15,000 people said that Jedi (from Star Wars) was their religion. About 4,000 of them in Prague. I would think that this is a joke but there was also an increase in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, etc. So who knows??