 | ||
This article is about the demographic features of the population of Macau, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Contents
- Structure of the population
- Place of Birth
- Nationality
- CIA World Factbook demographic statistics
- Ethnic Group
- Population
- Male and Female Pattern
- Age structure
- Infant mortality rate
- Life expectancy at birth
- Total fertility rate
- Religions
- Languages
- Literacy
- Immigration and Crime
- Health
- Main causes of death
- References
Macau's population is 95% Chinese, primarily Cantonese and some Hakka, both from nearby Guangdong Province. The remainder are of Portuguese or mixed Chinese-Portuguese ancestry. Some Japanese, including descendants of Japanese Catholics who were expelled by shoguns, also live in Macau.
The official languages are Portuguese and Cantonese Chinese. The residents commonly (85.7%) speak Cantonese, Mandarin is spoken by 3.2% at home, about 40% are able to communicate in standard Mandarin. English and Portuguese are spoken as a first language by 1.5% and 0.6% respectively. The other popular topolect is Hokkien (Min Nan), spoken by a small percentage of the population. The creole Macanese language (Patuá or Macaista Chapado) is almost extinct.
Macau has a number of universities.
Structure of the population
Structure of the population (01.07.2012) (Estimates) :
Place of Birth
Immigration is an essential component of the population. Results of the 2011 Population Census indicated that 326,376 (59.1% of the total population) were born outside Macau, an increase of 3.0 percentage points over the last ten years. Analysed by place of birth, 255,186 (46.2%) were born in Mainland China, down by 1.2 percentage points from 2001. 226,127 (40.9%) were born in Macau, 19,355 (3.5%) in Hong Kong and 1,835 (0.3%) in Portugal. There were more persons born in other countries or territories as the number of non-resident workers increased. Among them, 14,544 were born in the Philippines, 7,199 in Vietnam and 6,269 in Indonesia, altogether taking up 5.1% of the total population. 1,942 were born in Europe other than Portugal, 2,252 in Americas, 959 in Africa and 672 in Oceania. Analysed by age group, 85.2% of the youth population (aged 0–14) were born in Macau, and 62.9% of those aged 35 and above were born in Mainland China.
As of 2011 35,578 people in Macau were originally from Fujian province in Mainland China, making up about 25% of the Mainland China-born people. The number of Fujianese in Macau increased after the 1999 handover.
Nationality
Analysed by nationality, 509,788 (92.3% of the total population) were of Chinese nationality, down by 2.9 percentage points from the 2001 Census; meanwhile, only 0.9% was of Portuguese nationality, a decrease of 1.1 percentage points. These figures can be misleading, because more than a 100,000 people in Macau are holders of a Portuguese passport, making them in effect Portuguese citizens. Over the last ten years, diversity of the various components of the population is enhanced as economic development has drawn people to invest, work or study in Macau; consequently, 37,695 (6.8%) were of other nationalities, up by 4.0 percentage points, with 2.7% being Filipinos. Macau is a Chinese community and those of Chinese ethnicity totalled 510,383, an increase of 94,030 over the past ten years; however, its proportion to the total population decreased by 3.3 percentage points to 92.4%. Those of wholly or partly Portuguese ethnicity totalled 8,106, up slightly by 333 compared with 2001; its proportion to the total decreased by 0.3 percentage point to 1.5%.
CIA World Factbook demographic statistics
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.