Those who live in a certain place are its inhabitants.
Inhabitant is one who lives . The verb inhabit, for its part, refers to living or dwelling . For example: "The inhabitants of the city have expressed their disagreement with the government's measures" , "The town is being left without inhabitants as young people decide to emigrate to other lands" , "No inhabitant of this neighborhood is free of guilt" .
Latin is the language that must be used to find the etymological origin of the term. And this is the result of the sum of two perfectly delimited parts: the verb habere , which is synonymous with “have” ; and the suffix -nte , which is equivalent to “agent” .
Inhabitant concept
The notion of inhabitant, therefore, can be considered according to different scales. We can talk about the inhabitant of a house , a neighborhood , a city , etc. In a house or apartment, the number of inhabitants is reduced compared to a neighborhood, a city, a province or a country.
All the inhabitants of the world form what is known as the human population . The statistical study of the population is called demography , whose etymological origin refers to the “description of the people” .
When it comes to determining this world population, it must be established that three factors are fundamentally taken into account: life expectancy, the number of births and the number of deaths that occur. Based on all this, we can know that currently it is more than 7,000 million.
Population density is associated with how the inhabitants are distributed in a territory.
Countries with smaller and larger populations
In addition to all this, it is important, from a curious and unique point of view, to know which countries are with the smallest number of inhabitants. In this sense, we could highlight that the one that takes first place is Vatican , since it only has 970 inhabitants. After it are other nations such as Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Marshall Islands and Antigua and Barbuda .
In contrast, the countries that are characterized by having the largest number of inhabitants are the following: China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, Nigeria, Japan and Mexico . All of them exceed one hundred million.
The density of inhabitants
Population density is linked to the distribution of the number of inhabitants in a territory. Areas are usually expressed in square kilometers: therefore, population density is expressed in inhabitants per square kilometer .
Large cities have a high population density, which often translates into housing, transportation and security problems. Rural towns, on the other hand, have low density, with little infrastructure and little labor.
Macau (a special administrative region of China ), Monaco and Singapore are the most densely populated countries in the world. Among the countries with lower density (although not with fewer inhabitants), Mongolia , Iceland and Australia stand out.
We also have to highlight that there is an important literary work that uses the term in question in its title. This is “The Inhabitants of the Uninhabited House” , written by Enrique Jardier Poncela in 1942 .