Ethnic Groups in Uzbekistan - Demographic Trends

Demographic Trends

Uzbekistan is Central Asia's most populous country. Its 28.1 million people (July 2011 estimate) comprise nearly half the region's total population.

The population of Uzbekistan is very young: 34.1% of its people are younger than 14. According to official sources, Uzbeks comprise a majority (80%) of the total population. Other ethnic groups include Russians 5.5%, Tajiks 5%, Kazakhs 3%, Karakalpaks 2.5%, and Tatars 1.5% (1996 estimates). There is some controversy about the percentage of the Tajik population. Official data from Uzbekistan that put the number of Tajiks at 5% of the population do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, choose to identify themselves as Uzbeks in population census forms. Some Western scholars, citing anonymous "observers" or "Tajiks around the country", accordingly estimate the number of Tajiks in Uzbekistan at 20% or even as high as 25%-30%.

Uzbekistan has an ethnic Korean population that was forcibly relocated to the region from the Soviet Far East in 1937-1938. There are also small groups of Armenians in Uzbekistan, mostly in Tashkent and Samarkand. The nation is 88% Muslim (mostly Sunni, with a 5% Shi'a minority), 9% Eastern Orthodox and 3% other faiths (which include small communities of Korean Christians, other Christian denominations, Buddhists, Baha'is, and more). The Bukharan Jews have lived in Central Asia, mostly in Uzbekistan, for thousands of years. There were 94,900 Jews in Uzbekistan in 1989 (about 0.5% of the population according to the 1989 census), but now, since the collapse of the USSR, most Central Asian Jews left the region for the United States or Israel. Fewer than 5,000 Jews remain in Uzbekistan.

Much of Uzbekistan's population was engaged in cotton farming in large-scale collective farms when the country was part of the Soviet Union. The population continues to be heavily rural and dependent on farming for its livelihood, although the farm structure in Uzbekistan has largely shifted from collective to individual since 1990.