In the 2001 census [INDEC], Argentina had a population of 36,260,130, and preliminary results from the 2010 census were of 40,091,359 inhabitants. Argentina ranks third in South America in total population and 33rd globally. Population density is of 15 persons per square kilometer of land area, well below the world average of 50 persons.

The population growth rate in 2010 was an estimated 1.03% annually, with a birth rate of 17.7 live births per 1,000 inhabitants and a mortality rate of 7.4 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants. The net migration rate has ranged from zero to four immigrants per 1,000 inhabitants.

The proportion of people under 15 is 25.6%, somewhat below the world average of 28%, and the proportion of people 65 and older is relatively high at 10.8%. In Latin America this is second only to Uruguay and well above the world average, which is currently 7%.

Argentina has one of Latin America’s lowest population growth rates, recently about 1% a year, as well as a comparatively low infant mortality rate. Its birth rate of 2.3 children per woman is still nearly twice as high as that in Spain or Italy, compared here as they have similar religious practices and proportions. The median age is approximately 30 years and life expectancy at birth is 76.7 years.

Urbanization

Argentina is highly urbanized. The ten largest metropolitan areas account for half of the population, and fewer than one in ten live in rural areas. About 3 million people live in Buenos Aires City and the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area totals around 13 million, making it one of the largest urban areas in the world.

The metropolitan areas of Córdoba and Rosario have around 1.3 million inhabitants each and Mendoza, Tucumán, La Plata, Mar del Plata, Salta and Santa Fe have at least half a million people each.

The population is unequally distributed amongst the provinces: about 60% live in the Pampa region (21% of the total area), including 15 million people in Buenos Aires Province; Córdoba Province Santa Fe Province and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires have 3 million each.

Seven other provinces have over one million people each: Mendoza, Tucumán, Entre Ríos, Salta, Chaco, Corrientes and Misiones. Tucumán is the most densely populated with 60 inhabitants/km², the only Argentine province more densely populated than the world average, while the southern province of Santa Cruz has around 1 inhabitant/km².

Most European immigrants settled in the cities, and the many small towns founded along the expanding railway system. From the 1930s rural migration into the nation’s larger cities accounted for much of their population growth.

Argentine cities were originally built in a colonial Spanish grid style and many still retain this general layout, which is known as a damero (checkerboard). Most of the larger cities also feature boulevards and diagonal avenues inspired by Haussmann’s renovation of Paris.

The city of La Plata, designed at the end of the 19th century by Pedro Benoit, combines the checkerboard layout with added diagonal avenues at fixed intervals — it was also the first in South America to have electric street lights.

Ethnic Groups

Argentina is a multiethnic society, which means that it is home to people of many different ethnical backgrounds. As a result, the people there usually treat their nationality as a citizenship, but not an ethnicity.

Argentina is, along with other areas of new settlement like Canada, Australia or the United States, a melting pot of different peoples.

Most Argentines are descendents of colonial-era settlers and of the 19th and 20th century immigrants from Europe, with about 90 % of the population being of European descent. Recent decades immigration includes mainly Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians, among other Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans and East Asians.

The most common ethnic groups are Italian and Spaniard (including Galicians and Basques). It is estimated that up to 25 million Argentines are of Italian descent, up to 60% of the total population.

There are also Germanic, Slavic, British and French populations. Smaller Jewish, Native American, Arab, East Asian, Gypsy, and African communities contribute to what has been referred to as a “crucible of races”.

Immigration

Immigration in Argentina, can be divided in several major stages:

• Spanish colonization starting in the 16th century, integrating the indigenous inhabitants.
• European immigration in the 19th century, focused on colonization and sponsored by the government (sometimes on lands “freed” of the native inhabitants by the Conquest of the Desert in the last quarter of the century).
• The forced introduction of blacks brought from Africa to work as slaves in the colony between the 17th and 19th centuries.
• Mostly urban immigration during the era of rapid growth in the late 19th century (from 1880 onwards) and the first half of the 20th century, before and after World War I and also after the Spanish Civil War.
• Economic migrants from Korea, China, Central America, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Colombia and from Central Europe and Eastern Europe in the late 20th century and early 21st century.

As with other areas of new settlement such as Canada, Australia, and the United States, Argentina is considered a country of immigrants. Most Argentines are descended from colonial-era settlers and of the 19th and 20th century immigrants from Europe, and 86.4% of Argentina’s population self-identify as of European descent.

An estimated 8% of the population is Mestizo, and a further 4% of Argentines are of Arab or Asian heritage. In the last national census, based on self-identification, 600,000 Argentines (1.6%) declared to be Amerindians.

Most of the 6.2 million European immigrants arriving between 1850 and 1950, regardless of origin, settled mainly in the center – southern region of Argentina, the city of Buenos Aires, as well as in other areas. Due to this large-scale European immigration, Argentina’s population more than doubled and consecuently increased the national population. Argentina was second only to the United States in the number of European immigrants received.

The majority of these European immigrants came from Italy and Spain. Italian immigrants arrived mainly from the Piedmont, Veneto and Lombardy regions, initially, and later from Campania and Calabria; up to 25 million Argentines have some degree of Italian descent, around 60% of the total population.

Spanish immigrants were mainly Galicians and Basques. Smaller but significant numbers of immigrants came from France (notably Béarn and the Northern Basque Country), Germany and Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.

The Welsh settlement in Patagonia, known as Y Wladfa, began in 1865; mainly along the coast of Chubut Province. In addition to the main colony in Chubut, a smaller colony was set up in Santa Fe and another group settled at Coronel Suárez, southern Buenos Aires Province. Of the 50,000 Patagonians of Welsh descent, about 5,000 are Welsh speakers. The community is centered around Gaiman, Trelew and Trevelin.

Eastern Europeans were also numerous, and arrived from Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and from Central Europe (particularly Poland, Hungary and Slovenia). Sizable numbers of immigrants also arrived from Balkan countries (Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and Croatia). Argentina has South America’s largest population of Armenians. 130,000 Armenian Argentines are reported to live in Argentina, including a population of 65,000 in Buenos Aires.

Although relatively few in number, English immigrants to Argentina have played a disproportionately large role in forming the modern state. Anglo-Argentines were traditionally often found in positions of influence in the railway, industrial and agricultural sectors.

The historical English Argentine status was complicated by an erosion of their economic influence during Perón’s nationalization of many British-owned companies in the 1940s and, more recently, by the Falklands War in 1982.

Emigration

The rate of Argentine emigration to Europe (especially to Spain and Italy) and, to a lesser degree, to South America (mostly to Uruguay and the Brazil) peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is noteworthy.

Most Argentines outside Argentina are people who have migrated from the middle and upper middle classes. The most popular immigration destinations in America are: USA, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia and Canada, but other communities’ stationed in Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

In Europe, Spain and Italy have large communities but also in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. There are also significant communities in Israel and Australia.

According to official estimates there are 600,000 worldwide Argentine, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration are about 806,369 since 2001. It is estimated that their descendants would be around 1,900,000.

The first wave of emigration occurred during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, with the main destinations in Spain, USA, Mexico and Venezuela. During the 1990s, due to the abolition of visas between Argentina and the United States, thousands of Argentines emigrated to the North American country.

The last major wave of emigration occurred during the 2001 crisis, the main destination in Europe, especially Spain, although there was also an increase in emigration to neighboring countries, particularly Brazil, Chile and Paraguay.

Languages

The official language of Argentina is Spanish, and it is spoken by practically the entire population in several different accents, each having various degrees of Italian and Spanish influences.

The most common accent of Spanish in Argentina is Rioplatense Spanish, and it is so named because it evolved in the central areas around the Río de la Plata basin. Its distinctive feature is widespread voseo, the use of the pronoun vos instead of tú for the second person singular. Rioplatense Spanish is as different from the rest Spanish accents as American English is of English from the UK.

Preliminary research has shown that Rioplatense Spanish, and particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian dialects, most closely resembling Neapolitan.This correlates well with immigration patterns. Argentina, and particularly Buenos Aires, had huge numbers of Italian settlers since the 19th century.

Italian influence is shown mainly in vocabulary, lingo and intonation. In addition to Rioplatense Spanish, people of the province of Córdoba have a distinctive intonation pattern. Along the Brazilian border it is quite common to hear a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish called Portuñol.

Some indigenous communities have retained their original languages. Guaraní is spoken by some in the north east, especially in Corrientes (where it enjoys official status) and Misiones. Quechua is spoken by some in the north west and has a local variant in Santiago del Estero. Aymara is spoken by members of the Bolivian immigrant community.

In Patagonia there are Welsh-speaking communities with around 25,000 using it as their second-language. Recent immigrants have brought Chinese and Korean (mostly to Buenos Aires). English, Brazilian Portuguese and French are also spoken. English is commonly taught at schools as a second language with Portuguese and French to a lesser extent.

Non-indigenous minority languages

Many Argentines also speak other European languages (Italian, Portuguese, French, German and Croatian, as examples) due to the vast number of immigrants from Europe that came to Argentina.

Argentina has more than 1,500,000 Italian speakers; this tongue is the second most widely spoken language in the nation. Italian immigration from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century made a lasting and significant impact on the pronunciation and vernacular of the nation’s spoken Spanish, giving it an Italian flair. Italian has contributed so much to Rioplatense Spanish that many foreigners mistake it for Italian.

English language is a required subject in many schools, and there are also many private English-teaching academies and institutions. Young people have become accustomed to English through movies and the Internet, and knowledge of the language is also required in certain jobs, so most middle-class children and teenagers now speak, read and/or understand it with various degrees of proficiency.

According to an official cultural consumption survey conducted in 2006, 42.3% of Argentines claim to know some English (though only 15.4% of those claimed to have a high level of English comprehension).

Standard German is spoken by between 400,000 and 500,000 Argentines of German ancestry, though the number may be as high as 2,800,000 according to some sources. German, is the third or fourth most spoken language in Argentina.

There are sources of around one million Levantine Arabic speakers in Argentina, as a result of immigration from the Middle East, mostly from Syria and Lebanon.

There is a small but prosperous community of Argentine Welsh-speakers of approximately 25,000 in the province of Chubut, in the Patagonia region, who descend from 19th century immigrants.

Religion

The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion but also requires the government to support Roman Catholicism economically. Until 1994 the President and Vice President had to be Roman Catholic, though there were no such restrictions on other government officials; although since 1945 members of other religious groups have held prominent posts. Catholic policy remains influential in government though, and still helps shape a variety of legislation.

In a study assessing world-wide levels of religious regulation and persecution, with scores ranging from 0–10 where 0 represented low levels of regulation or persecution, Argentina received a score of 1.4 on Government Regulation of Religion, 6.0 on Social Regulation of Religion, 6.9 on Government Favoritism of Religion and 6 on Religious Persecution.

According to the World Christian Database Argentines are: 92.1% Christian, 3.1% agnostic, 1.9% Muslim, 1.3% Jewish, 0.9% atheist, and 0.9% Buddhist and others. Argentine Christians are mostly Roman Catholic with estimates for the number of Catholics varying from 70% to 90% of the population (though perhaps only 20% attend services regularly).

Evangelical churches have been gaining a foothold since the 1980s with approximately 9% of the total population, Pentecostal churches and traditional Protestant denominations are present in most communities and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims 330,000 followers in Argentina (their seventh-largest congregation in the world).

Argentina has the largest Jewish population of any country in Latin America, about 300,000. Muslim Argentines number about 400,000–500,000, or approximately 1% of the population (as of 2010). A recent study found that approximately 11% of Argentines are non-religious (which includes those who believe in God but do not follow a religion), 4% are agnostics and 5% are atheist.

Overall 24% attended religious services regularly. Protestants were the only group with a majority of followers who regularly attended services.