Denmark

The population of Denmark, as registered by Statistics Denmark, was 5.825 million in April 2020. Denmark has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.9 years, with 0.97 males per female. Despite a low birth rate, the population is growing at an average annual rate of 0.59% because of net immigration and increasing longevity. The World Happiness Report frequently ranks Denmark's population as the happiest in the world. This has been attributed to the country's highly regarded education and health care systems, and its low level of income inequality. Denmark is a historically homogeneous nation. However, as with its Scandinavian neighbours, Denmark has recently transformed from a nation of net emigration, up until World War II, to a nation of net immigration. Today, residence permits are issued mostly to immigrants from other EU countries (54% of all non-Scandinavian immigrants in 2017). Another 31% of residence permits were study- or work-related, 4% were issued to asylum seekers and 10% to persons who arrive as family dependants. Overall, the net migration rate in 2017 was 2.1 migrant(s)/1,000 population, somewhat lower than the United Kingdom and the other Nordic countries.      The Inuit are indigenous to Greenland in the Kingdom and have traditionally inhabited Greenland and the northern parts of Canada and Alaska in the Arctic. From the 18th century up to the 1970s, the Danish government (Dano-Norwegian until 1814) have through time tried to assimilate the Greenlandic Inuit, encouraging them to adopt the majority language, culture and religion. Because of this "Danization process", several persons of Inuit ancestry now identify their mother tongue as Danish. Christianity is the dominant religion in Denmark. In January 2020, 74.3% of the population of Denmark were members of the Church of Denmark (Den Danske Folkekirke), the officially established church, which is Protestant in classification and Lutheran in orientation. The membership percentage have been in steadily decline since the 1970s, mainly as fewer newborns are being baptised into it. Only 3% of the population regularly attend Sunday services and only 19% of Danes consider religion to be an important part of their life. The Constitution states that the sovereign must have the Lutheran faith, though the rest of the population is free to adhere to other faiths.