PEOPLE

Demographics of Afghanistan
The population of Afghanistan is divided into a wide variety of ethnic groups. Because a systematic census has not been held in the country in decades, exact figures about the size and composition of the various ethnic groups are not available. Therefore most figures are approximations only. According to the CIA World Factbook, an approximate ethnic group distribution is as follows:

Ethnic groups of Afghanistan ██ 42% Pashtun ██ 27% Tajik and Qezelbash ██ 9% Hazara ██ 9% Uzbek 4% Aimak ██ 3% Turkmen ██ 2% Baloch 5% other (Pashai, Nuristani, Brahui, etc.)
The Encyclopædia Britannica gives a slightly different list for various ethnolinguistic groups in Afghanistan:
49% Pashtun
18% Tajik
9% Hazara
8% Uzbek
4% Aimak
3% Turkmen
9% other
Based on official census numbers from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as information found in main - mostly scholarly - sources, the Encyclopædia Iranica gives the following list:
36.4% Pashtun
33.6% Tajik, Farsiwan, and Qezelbash
8.0% Hazara
8.0% Uzbek
3.2% Aimak
1.6% Baloch
9.2% other Languages

see also: Languages of Afghanistan under; Culture

Languages of Afghanistan
The CIA factbook on languages spoken in Afghanistan is as follows: Pashto 35% (in gray) and Persian (Dari) 50% (in pink), both Indo-European languages from the Iranian languages sub-family. Others include Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 9% (in green), as well as 30 minor languages 4% (primarily Balochi (in orange) and Pashai (in blue) and Nuristasni (in purple). Bilingualism is common.
According to the Encyclopædia Iranica[18], the Persian language is the mother tongue of roughly 1/3 of Afghanistan's population, while - at the same time - it is the most widely used language of the country, spoken by ca. 90% of the population. It further states that Pashto is spoken by ca. 50% of the population.


Religions
Religiously, Afghans are over 99% Muslim: approximately 74-89% Sunni and 9-25% Shi'a (estimates vary). Other religions in Afghanistan include Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and Hinduism. Afghanistan was once home to an ancient Jewish community, numbering approximately 5,000 in 1948. (See Bukharan Jews.) Most Jewish families fled the country after the 1979 Soviet invasion, and only one individual, Zablon Simintov, remains today. With the fall of the Taliban, a number of Sikhs have returned to the Ghazni, Nangarhar, Kandahar and Kabul provinces of Afghanistan.
Largest cities
The only city in Afghanistan with over one million residents is its capital, Kabul. The other major cities in the country are, in order of population size, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kunduz.
See also: List of cities in Afghanistan and Places in Afghanistan