Prague

People

The population of Prague stands somewhere around 1,225,000, a number that has been declining since the 1980s. Despite a sizable number of immigrants and foreign workers, the city (like most advanced European societies) has an extremely low birthrate. Most Czech citizens are Roman Catholic (43 percent) while the minority are Protestant (15 percent), and a total of 82 percent are Christian. Most of the population consists of Czech nationals, Moravians, Slovaks, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and an unknown number of itinerant Gypsies. The official language is Czech, but many know Russian as well, and many more would have known German if, after World War II (1939–45), around 2.5 million ethnic Germans had not been expelled from the Sudenten region in retaliation for wartime atrocities.