page_title: Faroe Islands
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Faroe Islands / Demographics
context_page_description: The Faroe or Faeroe Islands are a North Atlantic archipelago located 320 kilometres north-northwest of Scotland, and about halfway between Norway and Iceland. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. The islands have a total area of about 1,400 square kilometres with a population of 52,656 as of August 2020.
  The terrain is rugged; the climate is subpolar oceanic climate —windy, wet, cloudy, and cool. Temperatures average above freezing throughout the year because of the Gulf Stream. As a result of the moderation and the northerly latitude, summers normally hover around 12 °C. Average temperatures are 5 °C in winter. The northerly latitude location also results in perpetual civil twilight during summer nights and very short winter days.
  Between 1035 and 1814, the Faroe Islands were part of the Kingdom of Norway, which was in a personal union with Denmark from 1450. In 1814, the Treaty of Kiel transferred Norway to the King of Sweden, on the winning side of the Napoleonic Wars, whereas Denmark retained the Faroe Islands, along with Greenland and Iceland.
context_section_description: The vast majority of the population are ethnic Faroese, of Norse and Celtic descent. Recent DNA analyses have revealed that Y chromosomes, tracing male descent, are 87% Scandinavian.
  The studies show that mitochondrial DNA, tracing female descent, is 84% Celtic.
  There is a gender deficit of about 2,000 women owing to migration. As a result, some Faroese men have married women from the Philippines and Thailand, whom they met through such channels as online dating websites, and arranged for them to emigrate to the islands. This group of approximately three hundred women make up the largest ethnic minority in the Faroes.
  The total fertility rate of the Faroe Islands is currently one of the highest in Europe. The fertility rate is 2.409 children born per woman (2015 est.).
  The 2011 census shows that of the 48,346 inhabitants of the Faroe Islands (17,441 private households in 2011), 43,135 were born in the Faroe Islands, 3,597 were born in the other two countries of the Kingdom of Denmark (Denmark or Greenland), and 1,614 were born outside the Kingdom of Denmark. People were also asked about their nationality, including Faroese. Children under 15 were not asked about their nationality. 97% said that they were ethnic Faroese, which means that many of those who were born in either Denmark or Greenland consider themselves as ethnic Faroese. The other 3% of those older than 15 said they were not Faroese: 515 were Danish, 433 were from other European countries, 147 came from Asia, 65 from Africa, 55 from the Americas, 23 from Russia.
  The Faroe Islands have people from 77 different nationalities.
  If the first inhabitants of the Faroe Islands were Irish monks, they must have lived as a very small group of settlers. Later, when the Vikings colonised the islands, there was a considerable increase in the population. However, it never exceeded 5,000 until the 19th century. Around 1349, about half the population perished in the Black Death plague.
  Only with the rise of the deep-sea fishery (and thus independence from agriculture in the islands' harsh terrain) and with general progress in the health service was rapid population growth possible in the Faroes. Beginning in the 19th century, the population increased tenfold in 200 years.
  At the beginning of the 1990s, the Faroe Islands entered a deep economic crisis leading to heavy emigration; however, this trend reversed in subsequent years to a net immigration. This has been in the form of a population replacement as young Faroese women leave and are replaced with Asian/Pacific brides.
  In 2011, there were 2,155 more men than women between the age of 0 to 59 in the Faroe Islands.
  The Faroese population is spread across most of the area; it was not until recent decades that significant urbanisation occurred. Industrialisation has been remarkably decentralised, and the area has therefore maintained quite a viable rural culture. Nevertheless, villages with poor harbour facilities have been the losers in the development from agriculture to fishing, and in the most peripheral agricultural areas, also known as Útoyggjar "Outer Islands", there are few young people. In recent decades, the village-based social structure has nevertheless been placed under pressure, giving way to a rise in interconnected "centres" that are better able to provide goods and services than the badly connected periphery. This means that shops and services are now relocating en masse from the villages into the centres, and slowly but steadily the Faroese population is concentrating in and around the centres.
  In the 1990s, the government abandoned the old national policy of developing the villages (Bygdamenning), and instead began a process of regional development (Økismenning). The term "region" referred to the large islands of the Faroes. Nevertheless, the government was unable to press through the structural reform of merging small rural municipalities to create sustainable, decentralised entities that could drive forward regional development. As regional development has been difficult on the administrative level, the go
caption: A stamp commemorating V. U. Hammershaimb, a 19th-century Faroese linguist and theologian
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