Greece Minorities
The only minority in Greece that has a specially recognized legal status is the Muslim minority (Μουσουλμανική μειονότητα, Mousoulmanikí meionótita) in Thrace, which amounts to approximately 0.95% of the total population. Its members are predominantly of Turkish, Pomak and Roma ethnic origins. Other recognized minorities include approximately 35,000 Armenians and 5,500 Jews.
There are also a number of linguistic minority groups, whose members speak a non-Greek language in addition to Greek and generally identify ethnically as Greeks. These include the Arvanites, who speak a form of Albanian known as Arvanitikaand the Aromanians and Moglenites, also known as Vlachs, whose languages are closely related to Romanian.
In northern Greece there are also Slavic-speaking groups, whose members identify ethnically as Greeks in their majority. Their dialects can be linguistically classified as forms of either Macedonian (locally called Slavomacedonian or simply Slavic), or Bulgarian (distinguished as Pomak in the case of the Bulgarophone Muslim Pomaks of Thrace).
