List of Diasporas - E

E

• Ecuadorian diaspora - People from Ecuador who reside in countries across the Americas (i.e. the U.S., see Ecuadorian Americans, also in Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil), Europe (esp. Spain and Italy, with some in France and elsewhere), and smaller numbers in Japan and Australia.
• Egyptian Copts, members of the Coptic Christian Church based in Egypt for about 2,000 years. Copts are thought to be connected with cultures and peoples of Ancient Egypt, then the religion was displaced by the arrival of Islam 1,400 yrs. ago. About 3 million Coptic Christians live around the world, the largest numbers are in North America and Australia; and Great Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway and Sweden in Europe.
• Eritrea - Around half a million of the total five million Eritreans fled the country during the thirty year Eritrean War of Independence. They have formed communities all over the western world (i.e. USA in Washington D.C., and Los Angeles; and Europe: Sweden, Germany and Italy). There are more than half a million Eritreans in refugee camps (most in Sudan).
• Estonians - When Estonia was invaded by the Soviet Army in 1944, large numbers of Estonians fled their homeland on ships or smaller boats over the Baltic Sea. Many refugees who survived the risky sea voyage to Sweden and/or Germany later moved from there to Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and/or Australia. Also, with the June deportation of 1941 and March deportation of 1949, the Soviet Union forcibly transferred tens of thousands of Estonians to Siberia. Some of these refugees and their descendants returned to Estonia after the nation regained its independence in 1991. The Russian Empire displaced a fairly high number of Estonians into exile, maybe the number of descendants (the 3.5 million outside Estonia) to have assimilated into Russian society. The Estonian people are generally small in size (0.9 million within Estonia), but doesn't it include Estonian sub-groups: the Chudes, Livonians, Setos and Voros in neighboring lands of Russia, Latvia and Lithuania. There is no way to know the corrected number of Estonians, unless to count 100,000 dual nationals in the former USSR or the number of expatriates in the EU countries (esp. Finland).